Epigraph
1. “The Broken Balance,” The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 162.
Introduction
1. “The Locust Years,” House of Commons (November 12, 1936). Available from http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/Locusts.html. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
2. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 743.
3. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 191f.
4. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright Sided: How the New Positive Thinking is Undermining America (New York: Picador, 2010).
5. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 17.
6. Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (New York: Routledge, 2012).
7. See Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis L. Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. 3rd Ed., (Burlington, VT: Chelsea Green, 3rd Ed., 2004); Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2011); James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and the Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010); and John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
8. On the low-hanging fruit of universal literacy, see Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (New York: Penguin kindle edition, 2010), Chapter One.
9. Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites.
10. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).
11. Michael Huesemann and Joyce Huesemann, Techno-fix: Why Technology won’t Save Us or the Environment (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2011).
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York; Vintage, 1974), 276.
13. John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2008).
Chapter 1
1. Media Matters with Robert McChesney (Urbana, IL: WILL-AM Radio, July 17, 2012). Available from: http://wil.illinois.edu/mediamatters/. (Accessed February 20, 2013)
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972), 476.
3. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, The Ecological Rift, 15.
4. See Nicholas B. Allen and Paul B. T. Badcock, “Darwinian models of depression: A review of evolutionary accounts of mood and mood disorders,” Progress in Neuro- Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry 30.5 (2006): 815–826.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 344.
6. Paul Kingsnorth, “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” Orion (January/February 2012). Available from: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6599. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
7. See Rockström, J., W. Steffen, K. Noone, Å. Persson, F. S. Chapin, III, E. Lambin, T. M. Lenton, M. Scheffer, C. Folke, H. Schellnhuber, B. Nykvist, C. A. De Wit, T. Hughes, S. van der Leeuw, H. Rodhe, S. Sörlin, P. K. Snyder, R. Costanza, U. Svedin, M. Falkenmark, L. Karlberg, R. W. Corell, V. J. Fabry, J. Hansen, B. Walker, D. Liverman, K. Richardson, P. Crutzen, and J. Foley. “Planetary boundaries:exploring the safe operating space for humanity,” Ecology and Society 14.2 (2009): 32. The boundaries are: climate change, ocean acidifi- cation, ozone depletion, phosphorous and nitrogen depletion, biodiversity loss, freshwater scarcity, land system change, aerosol loading and chemical pollution.
8. “Men are deceived into thinking themselves free, a belief that consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are deter- mined. Therefore the idea of their freedom is simply the ignorance of the causes of their action.” Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), 35.
9. “This workshop where ideals are manufactured - it seems to me it stinks of so many lies.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 47.
10. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 13.
11. See Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009); Alex Callinicos, Bonfire of Illusions: Twin Crises of the Liberal World (London: Polity Press, 2010); Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession (London: Pluto Press, 2012); and Guglielmo Carchedi, Behind the Crisis: Marx’s Dialectic of Value and Knowledge (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
12. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/user/brendanm-cooney. See especially “The Falling Rate of Profit 1 of 2” and “The Falling Rate of Profit 2 of 2.” (Accessed June 1, 2012)
13. Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production 50.
14. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The Free Press, 2012), 59-96.
15. I do not mean to oversell things vis-à-vis Marx. In fact it is a good maxim never to bet against him regarding whatever “new” economic phenomenon is alleged to have escaped his notice. Marx was more than aware of the potential for credit- fueled upward instability. He even, interestingly, saw in the development of credit “the latent abolition of capital ownership.” Marx further explains that “[i]f the credit system appears as the principal lever of overproduction and excessive speculation in commerce, this is simply because the reproduction process, which is elastic and by nature, is now forced [once the credit system has developed] to its extreme limits; and this is because a great part of the social capital is applied by those who are not the owners, and who therefore proceed quite unlike owners who, when they function themselves, anxiously weigh the limits of their private capital.” (Marx, Capital, Volume III (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 572. Andrew Kliman points to this passage as an early discussion of the “moral hazard” that arises from commercial credit’s operative long-term tendency to sever the direction of capital from its ownership, to separate financial reward from financial risk (e.g. CEO’s earning bonuses for failing companies, too big to fail banks socializing their casino losses). See Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production, 19-20.
16. Available from: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/05/20/recovery-or-collapse-bet-on-collapse/ (Accessed February 21, 2013)
17. Available from: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2010/speech433.pdf. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
18. Hyman P. Minsky, Can “It” Happen Again? Essays on Instability and Finance (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1982), 123.
19. Alan Greenspan, “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society,” Francis Boyer Lecture of The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. (December 5, 1996). Available from: http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
20. Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, rev. ed. (London: Zed Books, 2011), 354-355. Keen elaborates his “modern debt jubilee” proposal in Steve Kfile://localhost/een, “The Debtwatch Manifesto,” Debtwatch.com (January 2, 2012). Available from/ http//:tinyurl.com:6nlxhyt.(Accessed February 21, 2013)
21. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012), 81.
22. “The Falling Time Cost of College: Evidence from a Half a Century of Time Use Data,” Review of Economics and Statistics 93.2 (2011): 468-478.
23. Available from: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2012/MJ/Feat/Kuma.htm (accessed February 21, 2013); drawn from Kevin Kumashiro, Bad Teacher! How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture (New York: Teachers College Press, 2012).
24. Ibid.
25. “Dan Ariely: The Polar Bear and the Prius,” available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFlXgSkvslI&feature=player_embedded. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
26. Jeremy Grantham, GMO Quarterly Letter (February 2012). Available from: https://www.gmo.com/America/Library/Letters/ (Accessed June 1, 2012)
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Andrew Nusca, “Rural U.S. Population Lowest in History, Demographers Say,” CBS News Smart Planet (July 28, 2011). Available from: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/smart-takes/rural-us-population-lowest-in-history-demographers-say/17982
30. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (New York: Penguin kindle edition, 2011).
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. See John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology,” The American Journal of Sociology 105.2 (September 1999): 366-405; and John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift.
34. Foster, Clark and York, The Ecological Rift,14.
35. See James Howard Kunstler, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012).
36. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Rowe Publishers, 1977), 127.
37. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Form and Reason and Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000) and Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition (Evolver Editions, 2011). I discuss internal norms peculiar to education in Democratic Education Stretched Thin: How Complexity Challenges a Liberal Ideal (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 62-79.
38. Levi Bryant, “The Stakes of SR/NFM/OOO/Onticology: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?” Larval Subjects (blog), June 5, 2012. Available from: http://larvalsubjects.word press.com/2012/06/05/the-stakes-of-srnfmoooonticology-whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolves/#comment-135177. (Accessed June 5, 2012)
Chapter 2
1. Capital, Volume III, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 180.
2. The “wave” terminology is drawn from Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978), 108-146.
3. See my Democratic Education Stretched Thin.
4. The language of “spheres” is developed in Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York, Basic Books, 1984). Alasdair MacIntyre provides an influential account of institutional corruption, defined as when the “internal goods” structuring a practice of whatever sort (including education) give way to “external goods” such as money or power, in his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (South Bend, IN; University of Notre Dame Press), Chs. 14-15. The locus classicus of the notion of regulatory capture is the free market economist George Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2.1 (Spring 1971): 3-21.
5. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 134-136.
6. Applied originally to Goldman Sachs, the famous vampire squid/blood funnel image is from Matt Taibbi, “The Great Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone (April 5, 2010). Available from: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
7. Harvey, The New Imperalism, 121-123.
8. The idea of “biopower” derives from the work of Michel Foucault on “biopolitics” (in such works as The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage, 2000)), as appro- priated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
9. Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. Karl Hillebrand (New York: Prometheus Books, 2006).
10. Alex Callinicos, Bonfire of Illusions: The Twin Crises of the Liberal World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 45.
11. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 12.
12. Ibid., 13.
13. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach in Quinton Hoare, ed., Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1975), 423.
14. My translation, “Il faut toujours suivre ceux qui cherchent la vérité et toujours fuir ceux qui l’ont trouvée.” This quote seems universally attributed to Gide, though I cannot find a specific source for it.
15. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 49-50.
16. See John Michael Greer, Apocalypse Not: Everything You Know About 2012, Nostradamus, and the Rapture is Wrong (Berkeley, CA: Viva Editions, 2011).
17. Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelations (New York: Viking, 2012).
18. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine.
19. Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism (London: Abacus, 2011), 419.
20. There are further nuances not directly relevant to the present analysis, e.g. Marx distinguishes the “organic” from the “technical” composition of capital, where the latter is the ratio of the absolute amounts of variable to fixed capital (however that might be assessed) and the former is the ratio of the present market values of them.
21. Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
22. See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “The Global Stagnation and China,” Monthly Review 63.9: 1-28.
23. Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).
24. I allude to the classic tale of Chinese peasant workers by Pearl Buck, The Good Earth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980).
25. Foster and McChesney, “The Global Stagnation and China,” 9.
26. Good catalogs of past and potential future technological “game changers” are to be found in Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2006); and Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: Why the Future is Better Than You Think (New York: The Free Press, 2012).
27. Michael J. Bazyler, Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 60-62.
28. Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production.
29. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III (New York: Penguin, 1981), 346.
30. See Ari Levaux, “The Latest Raw Milk Raid: An Attack on Food Freedom?” Atlantic Monthly (August 15, 2011). Available from: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive /2011/08/the-latest-raw-milk-raid-an-attack-on-food-freedom/243635/. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
31. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Social and Economic Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
32. Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value, 110-111. Andy Higginbottom helpfully defines imperialist rent as “the above average or extra profits realised as a result of the inequality between North and South in the global capitalist system. Imperialist rent is a case of above average super- profits or monopoly profits. Since normal profits derive from surplus value and the exploitation of workers, the presence of super-profits indicates intensified or additional mechanisms of exploitation.” Andy Higginbottom, “’Imperialist Rent’ in Practice and Theory,” paper presented at “Workshop: Trade Unions, Free Trade and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity,” Center for the Study of Social and Global Justice, University of Nottingham (UK) (December 11-12, 2011), 2. Available from: http://andreasbieler.net/work shop/. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
33. Higginbottom, “’Imperialist Rent’ in Practice and Theory,” 17-24.
34. Alex Callinicos, Bonfire of Illusions, 45.
35. See Samir Amin, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2011).
36. Marx, Capital: Volume III (London: Penguin, 1991), 367. As cited in Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production, 21.
37. Karl Marx, German Ideology (1846) in The Marx-Engels Reader, Ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 172-173.
38. See Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
39. Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World’s Food (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
40. “Homo suburbiensis” is from Australian poet Bruce Dawe’s poem of the same name, available in his Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1954 to 1997 (Victoria: Pearson Australia, 2001).
41. Richard Wolff, Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It (North Hampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2009)
42. This American Life, Episode 355 (National Public Radio: Original air date May 9, 2008). Available from: h t t p : / / w w w . t h i s a m e r i c a n l i f e . o r g / r a d i o - archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money. (Accessed February 21, 2013).
43. James Galbraith, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (New York: Free Press, 2008).
44. Among the many analyses of this process, economist Michael Hudson’s work is especially helpful. A recent relevant paper is “Scenarios for Recovery: How to Write Down the Debts and Restructure the Financial System,” paper given at Paradigm Lost: Rethinking Economics and Politics, hosted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, (Berlin, April 13, 2012). Available from: http://ineteconomics.org/sites/inet.civicactions.net/files/hudson-michael-berlin-paper.pdf. Accessed February 21, 2013).
45. David Harvey, The New Imperialism.
46. Stephen P. Broughman et al., “Characteristics of Private Schools in the United States: Results from the 2009–10 Private School Universe Survey” (Washington DC: National Center for Education Statistics, US Department of Education, 2011), 2. Available from: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011339.pdf. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
47. Wen Tiejun et al., “Ecological Civilization, Indigenous Culture, and Rural Reconstruction in China,” Monthly Review, 63.9 (February 2012): 31.
48. Slavoj Žižek, as cited in Rebecca Mead, “The Marx Brother,” The New Yorker (May 5, 2003).
49. Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production, 26-27.
Chapter 3
1. Hyman P. Minsky, Can “It” Happen Again? Essays on Instability and Finance (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1982)?, 284.
2. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia (New York: The New Press, 1995), 36.
3. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III (London: Hammondsworth, 1976), 198. As quoted in Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1983).
4. Michael Hudson, “Paul Krugman’s Economic Blinders,” Michael-Hudson.com (May 14, 2012). Available from: http://michael-hudson.com/2012/05/paul-krugmans-economic-blinders/
5. Hyman P. Minsky, Can “It” Happen Again?, 66.
6. Ibid.
7. Hyman P. Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 10.
8. See Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? (London: Zed Books, 2011), 319-356.
9. “…the massive destruction of capital value that took place during the Great Depression and World War II set the stage for the boom that followed.” Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production, 23.
10. “Here at last monopoly capitalism finally found the answer to the ‘on what’ question? On what could government spend enough to keep the system from sinking into the mire of stagnation? On arms, more arms, and ever more arms.” Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 213.
11. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 125.
12. Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009).
13. Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island (New York: Vintage, 2007). Booklist memorably - and relevantly - describes the novel as concerning a cult of sexually promis- cuous health fanatics who achieve immortality through cloning.
14. Plato, Republic, 540b.
15. Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us (New York: Penguin, 1996).
16. Gary S. Becker, Human Capital, 16.
17. Ibid., 17.
18. Mikhail Bakunin, “On the International Workingman’s Association and Karl Marx (1872).” Available from: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1872/karl-marx.htm.
19. John Marsh, Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 160.
20. David J. Blacker, “The Institutional Autonomy of Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 32.2 (May 2000): 229-246.
21. A sobering recent meditation on this phenomenon is found in Henry A. Giroux, Education and the Crisis of Public Values (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
22. This is not a criticism of Freirean pedagogies because Freire and many inspired by him, such as the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, presuppose that very larger social movement of resistance within which to situate their pedagogical efforts. See the interview with Rebecca Tarlau, conducted by Sasha Lilly, “Efforts by Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) to Transform Education,” Against the Grain (radio program and podcast), KPFA.org, July 3, 2012. Available from: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/82063.
23. John Marsh, Class Dismissed, 178.
24. Ibid., 168, 169.
25. Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy: An Essay on the Progress of Economic Thought (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), 45.
26. Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (New York: Routledge, 2012), 4; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The Free Press, 2010).
27. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009); Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? “Final Solution” in History (Verso, 1990).
28. For statistics on race and incarceration in the U.S., see The Sentencing Project (available from: www.sentencing project.org); for the number of African-American males with records, see Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 7.
29. Slavoj Žižek, “Philosopher, Cultural Critic and Cyber- Communist” (interview), JAC Online: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture and Politics 21.2 (2011): 257. Available from: http://jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol21.2/olson-zizek.pdf. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
30. National Center for Education Statistics, “Fast Facts,” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2011). Available from: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/. (Accessed February 21, 2013).
31. For an excellent case study of Chicago along these lines, see Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race and the Right to the City (London: Routledge, 2011).
32. Istvan Meszaros, “The Dialectic of Structure and History: An Introduction,” Monthly Review 63.1 (May 2011): 26-27.
33. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Cambridge University Press, 1999), A51/B75.
34. Immanuel Kant, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 35-36.
35. Classic accounts are found in Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (Chicago: Haymarket Books, reprint ed., 2011); Pierre Bourdieu, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977); and Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
36. Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 21.
37. Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (London: Clarendon Press, 1966), 2.
38. Mohammad Fadel, “Special Analysis: Religion and the Arab Spring,” The Islamic Monthly (Summer/Fall 2011). Available from: http://onlinedigeditions.com/display_article.php?id=832740. (Accessed February 21, 2013).
39. Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani, eds., The Human Economy (Cambridge: Policy Press, 2010); and Jan Breman, Outcast Labour in Asia: Circulation and Informalization of the Workforce at the Bottom of the Economy (London: Oxford University Press, 2010).
40. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).
41. Jan Breman, The Labouring Poor in India: Patterns of Exploitation, Subordination and Exclusion (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), as quoted in Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, 199.
42. David Simon, “Few opportunities for an actress from the other America,’” Baltimore Sun (March 12, 2011). Available from: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-03-12/news/bs-ed-simon-statement-20110312_1_drug-prohibition-drug-arrest-drug-economy. (Accessed February 21, 2013).
43. Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34 (2006): 705.
44. Mike Judge, Director, Idiocracy (Hollywood: 20th Century Fox, 2007).
45. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 257f.
46. The dropout rate is near 70% in some urban areas. Source: Yes We Can: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males (Cambridge, MA: Schott Foundation for Public Education, 2010). Available from: http://www.blackboys-report.org/bbreport.pdf. (Accessed February 21, 2013.) On incarceration rates, “By their mid-30’s, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.” Erick Eckholm, “Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn,” New York Times (March 20, 2006).
47. Michelle Holder, “Unemployment in New York City During the Recession and Early Recovery: Young Black Men Hit the Hardest” (New York: Community Service Society, 2010). Available from: http://b.3cdn.net/nycss/ea8952641d08e68fbb_c4m6bofb0.pdf. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
48. Soren Kierkegaard, Diary of a Seducer (London: Continuum, 2006).
49. Ebenezer C. Brewer, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2001), 437.
50. I allude to the Massachusetts General School Act (1647), commonly referred to as the Old Deluder Satan act. It reads in pertinent part: “It being one chief project of the old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, it is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord has increased them [in] number to fifty house- holders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general.” See Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 180.
Chapter 4
1. Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, rev. ed. (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2011), 112.
2. Michael Hudson, “Debts that Can’t Be Paid, Won’t Be,” Michael-Hudson.com (April 10, 2012). Available from: http://michael-hudson.com/2012/04/debts-that-cant-be-paid-wont-be/
3. See Michael B. Katz, Irony of Early School Reform.
4. I am drawing from Martin Heidegger’s analysis of tool-use from Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
5. “Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones.’” Bill Moyers & Company (July 20, 2012). http://billmoyers.com/segment/chris-hedges-on-capitalism’s-‘sacrifice-zones’/
6. Paul Conklin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 3.
7. Almost alone among industrialized countries, the U.S. has no formal national provision of education at any level. Though the federal government asserts in various ways - mostly via statute and constitutional law - the states enjoy plenary power over their education system. They are only limited formally by indirect constitutional considerations that may come into play (e.g. are they violating basic rights?) and practically by their entirely contingent desire to obtain federal funding through categorical aid. Most federal statutes in education, such as Title IX (sex discrimination), IDEA (disabilities education) and No Child Left Behind (testing) are not direct mandates but rather are contingent upon states’ desire to secure federal funding; in principle, absent that desire they would not apply.
8. “New Home for Innovation: JP Morgan Chase Innovation Center Opens at UD,” UDaily, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, October 17, 2011. Available from: http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2012/oct/innovation101711.html. (Accessed February 21, 2013). The University’s news organ reports, the “Innovation Center was built as part of the strategic JPMorgan Chase-University of Delaware collabo- ration established in December 2009 focused on building a pipeline of technology talent through University curriculum, enriching internships and joint research projects to drive innovation [emphasis added].”
9. Immanuel Wallerstein, “Cities in socialist theory and capitalist praxis,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 8.1 (1984), 64.
10. For a provocative statement, see “Russ” (2011) at the blog “Volatility,” (available from: http//attempter.wordpress.com): “Contrary to propaganda, there’s nothing modernistic about corporations. On the contrary, they’re a carryover phenomenon from feudalism. This feudal vestige persisted through the early heyday of capitalism, soon becoming the preferred mode of organization to prevent the full textbook logic of capitalism from developing. The result was that the economy never evolved beyond a feudal- capitalist hybrid. And once capitalism reached its terminal stage starting in the 1970s, where the combination of Peak Oil and the terminally declining profit rate threatened to attenuate forms of economic domination completely, the corporation became the basic unit of class war, and the anti- social, anti-political, anti-sovereign form around which full feudalism is intended to be restored.” See also M. Zafirovski, “Neo-Feudalism in America? Conservatism in Relation to European Feudalism,” International Review of Sociology 17.3 (2007): 393.
11. Istvan Meszaros, “The Dialectic of Structure and History: An Introduction,” Monthly Review 63.1 (2011), 26-7.
12. J. Medaille, “Neo-Feudalism and the Invisible Fist,” The Distributist Review (blog), August 23, 2010. Available from: http://distributistrview/com/mag/2010/08/neo-feudalism-and-the-invisible-fist. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
13. Charles Hugh Smith, Why Things are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It (Amazon Digital Services: kindle edition, 2012).
14. Available from: http://studentloanjustice.org, http://occupys-tudentdebt.com, and http://forgivestudentdebt.com. (All accessed January 23, 2012)
15. R. Applebaum, “Want a real economic stimulus and jobs plan? Forgive student loan debt!,” Available from: http://signon.org/sign/want-a-real-economic.
16. See David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (London: Melville House, 2011): 2, 82.
17. For more detail, see FinAid: The SmartStudent Guide to Financial Aid, available from: http://www.finaid.org/loans (accessed January 23, 2012)
18. See lawyers.com, “Student Loans in Bankruptcy,” available from: http://bankruptcy.lawyers.com/consumer-bankrupt cy/Student-Loans-In-Bankruptcy.html. (Accessed January 23, 2012).
19. M. Pilon, “The $55,000 Student-loan Burden: As Default Rates on Borrowing for Higher Education Rise, some Borrowers See No Way Out; ‘This is Just Outrageous Now,’” Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2010. Available from: http://online.wsj.com/article; Cameron Huddleston, “What Happens When You Default on Student Loans,” Kiplinger (August 30, 2010). Available from: http://www.kiplinger.com/columns/kiptips/archives/what-happens-when-you-default-on-student-loans.html. (Accessed February 21, 2013).
20. United Nations, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human rights,, Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (Geneva: The United Nations, 1956). Available from: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/slavetrade.htm.
21. Andrew Ross, “Andrew Ross Speaks to Occupy Wall Street on Student Debt,” SocialText (September 6, 2011). Available from: http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2011/09/andrew-ross-speaks-to-ows-on-student-debt-php; and Jeffrey Williams, “Academic Freedom and Indentured Students: Escalating Student Debt is a Kind of Bondage,” Academe 98.1 (January-February 2012). Available from: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubres/academe/2012/JF.
22. In Sara Jaffe, “OWS Education Activists Launch Student Debt Refusal Pledge,” Alternet (November 21, 2011). Available from: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/737128.
23. “The labor force participation rate for all youth - the proportion of the population 16 to 24 years old working or looking for work - was 59.5 percent in July, the lowest July rate on record. The July 2011 rate was down by 1.0 percentage point from July 2010 and was 18.0 percentage points below the peak for that month in 1989 (77.5 percent).” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment and Unemployment Among Youth Summary” (August 2012). http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.nr0.htm.
24. Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse, 112-113.
25. Ken Lawrence, “Karl Marx on American Slavery,” Sojourner Truth Organization (1972). Available from: http://www.sojournertruth.net.marxslavery.pdf.
26. Gary S. Becker, Human Capital, 16.
27. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 493 (1954).
28. Recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on employment status and educational attainment may be found at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm (accessed January 23, 2012). Unsurprisingly, the data show that employment rates are significantly higher for those with more college.
29. Samir Amin, “The Right to Education,” Pambazuka News 557 (November 10, 2011). Available from: http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/77838.
30. Anthony Grafton, “Our universities: Why are they failing?,” New York Review of Books 59.1 (January 12, 2012).
31. Carey Nelson, “From the President: One Last Chance,” Academe (January-February 2011). Available from: http://aaup.org/AAUP/pubres/academe/2011/JF/col/ftp.htm.
32. Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969 [1847]), 85.
Chapter 5
1. This motto of “enlightened absolutism” is discussed in Immanuel Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784)” Available from: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html.
2. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012).
3. Katie Kindelan, “Ohio School Lets Gay Student Wear Controversial T-Shirt,” ABC News, April 5, 2012. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/04/ohio-school-agrees-to-let-gay-student-wear-controversial-t-shirt-for-one-day/.
4. This folktale is related in Alan Watts, Tao and the Watercourse Way (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 31. There is also a wonderful children’s book that expresses the same theme for the preschool set: Margery Cuyler, “That’s Bad! That’s Good!” (New York: Henry Holt, 1993).
5. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 559 (1896).
6. See, e.g. Cummings v. Richmond County Board of Education, 175 U.S. 528 (1899).
7. Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985).
8. Jan Crawford Greenberg, Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 118.
9. New Jersey v. TLO, 469 U.S. 325 (1985), Vernonia School District v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646 (1995), and Board of Education v. Earls, 536 U.S. 822 (2002).
10. Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565 (1975).
11. Board of Education of Westside Community Schools v. Mergens, 496 U.S. 226 (1990), which upholds the federal Equal Access Act (1984).
12. Reynolds Holding, “Ruling ‘Bong Hits’ Out of Bounds,” Time (June 25, 2007). Available from: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1637131,00.html.
13. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969).
14. There is one more preliminary consideration for whether expression is eligible for constitutional protection that will be addressed later in the chapter.
15. The classic work on the perennial capitulation of school administrators to outside interests is Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
16. Originally from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the “market- place of ideas” metaphor used in Tinker quotes Justice William Brennan’s majority opinion in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589, 603 (1967): “’The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.’ Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U.S. 479, 487 (1960). The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.’ The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.”’
17. James E. Ryan, “The Supreme Court and Public Schools,” Virginia Law Review 86.7 (2000): 27. Ryan continues, “In short, the Court’s approach can be defended, at least generally, on the grounds of necessity. Schools need some constitutional room to achieve their goals, and the Court needs to ensure that students do not shed all of their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse door. A defensible way to resolve this dilemma is to identify the core, universal function of schools, and to use this function as a guide to determine the circum- stances in which schools will be granted deference.”
18. Section 894 (Article 94) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice reads in pertinent part: “Mutiny or Sedition: (a) Any person subject to this chapter who - (1) with intent to usurp or override lawful military authority, refuses, in concert with any other person, to obey orders or otherwise do his duty or creates any violence or disturbance is guilty of mutiny. (b) A person who is found guilty of attempted mutiny, mutiny, sedition, or failure to suppress or report a mutiny or sedition shall be punished by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.”
19. Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986).
20. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once famously (or infamously) admitted the difficulty in defining pornog- raphy, but then added, “I know it when I see it.” This is, of course, as Potter himself later recognized, untenable as a legal standard. See Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964).
21. An additional area of concern involves the potential advocacy of violence, particularly in this post-Columbine and Newtown era of heightened school safety concerns. There are probably too many gray areas here, but generally speaking the judgment will be whether the alleged threat contained in the message is established as real and direct enough. So, for example, a school would be on firmer ground disallowing a “KKK” symbol than it would a message bearing the words “white power,” because the Ku Klux Klan has an unambiguous track record of intimidation and violence, whereas the “white power” message, however obnoxious, does not have that level of specificity. The analysis in such cases is really that due to the threat of violence it carries, the message constitutes conduct rather than speech, and therefore it is outside the scope of First Amendment protection. Allowing state statutes prohibiting cross burning, the Court directly affirms the threat-like nature of this practice in Virginia v. Black et al. 538 U.S. 343 (2003) - this latter being authored, interestingly, by none other than Justice Thomas.
22. Bethel v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 683.
23. Hazelwood School District et al. v. Kuhlmeier et al., 484 U.S. 260 (1988).
24. An exception might be where the “educational purpose” of the field trip is inherently very broad, for example, a trip to see a political candidate or governmental official who, by virtue of his or her position (or sought position), is legiti- mately the object of many kinds of citizens’ grievances or “petitions.” For this reason, an event such as one where school students are sent to watch a presidential motorcade might be thought to constitute more of a public forum.
25. Morse v. Frederick, 393 U.S. 423.
26. Ibid., 424.
27. Timing is crucial in jurisprudence. While it is not in itself unreasonable to question whether something has a constitu- tional basis, it is unreasonable to reject out of hand that basis where there is a well-established line of precedent. Thomas’s argument would have been reasonable (though perhaps wrong) in 1969, just as Justice Hugo Black’s Tinker dissent was reasonable at the time. The Court does change course and reverse itself from time to time. But even the majority opinions associated with dramatic reversals usually offer some legal rationale for how the reversal is not really a reversal but is somehow consistent with the relevant Court case law. (For example, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 637 (1896) on the constitutionality of de jure racial segregation on the premise that since education had become more important in 1954 than it was in 1896, it was now worthy of Fourteenth Amendment consideration.) This is wholly rational for an institution whose legitimacy derives in large part from stare decisis deference to precedent.
28. Morse v. Frederick, 393 U.S. 410.
29. Connecticut in 1818 became the final state to abandon an official establishment of religion. See Leonard W. Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 49.
30. Morse v. Frederick, 393 U.S. 412.
31. Jonathan Zimmerman, “Got Discipline?” Los Angeles Times (June 28, 2007). Available from: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zimmerman28jun28,1,6696557.story.
32. Henry Mark Holzer, “Justice Clarence Thomas and Utopian Originalism,” presented at the Heritage Foundation (Washington, DC), November 14, 2007.
33. Morse v. Frederick, 393 U.S. 412.
34. Aside from the area directly concerning school-sponsored religious exercises (which has a complicated post–World War II history), the only direct students’ rights precursor to Tinker would be the sort of beachhead of freedom of conscience in circumscribed areas, most notably the right to opt out of the Pledge of Allegiance (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 [1943]). Realizing this, Thomas would probably want to set back the clock a few decades earlier, at least to the 1930s.
35. Tinker v. Des Moines, 393 U.S. 510.
36. Clarence Thomas, quoted in Adam Liptak, “Reticent Justice Opens Up to a Group of Students,” New York Times, April 14, 2009, A11.
37. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii.
38. Ibid., 49.
39. Ibid.
40. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
41. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 41.
42. One blogging wit posts: “You can almost picture Thomas with a paddle in his hand, ordering some mischievous child of yore to bend over for a good, compassionate Republican spanking. Thomas’s ideal school seems to be Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby.” Available from http://nomore-hornets.blogspot.com/2007/06/bong-hits-4-thomas.html. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
43. Thomas seems to suggest as much in his recent autobiog- raphy, My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir (New York: Harper, 2007). In his review of this book, William Grimes writes that Thomas “portrays himself as a persecuted, almost Christlike figure singled out by the liberal establishment, at the behest of his civil rights enemies, not just for criticism but also for total annihilation” (Grimes, “The Justice Looks Back and Settles Old Scores,” New York Times, October 10, 2007; available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/books/10grim.html). If, following Boym, a conspiracy-seeking mindset is a key indicator of a dangerous form of restorative nostalgia, the paranoia evident from Thomas’s own pen certainly makes him look worse in this regard. (However germane it may be to the nostalgia discussion, one should be mindful that Thomas’s autobiography, where he speaks merely as “a book author,” is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the legal hermeneutics argument.)
44. I make an argument along these lines in Blacker, Democratic Education Stretched Thin, 26–28.
45. Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” The Hedgehog Review 9.2 (2007), 9.
46. Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 18.
47. See Ahlquist v. City of Cranston, No. 11-138 (D. Rhode Island 2012012); and “Will Phillips, 10-Year-Old, Won’t Pledge Allegiance to a Country that Discriminates Against Gays,” Huffington Post, March 18, 2010. Available from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/12/10-year-old-wont-pledge-a_n_355709.html. (Accessed February 21, 2013.) The CNN interview of Phillips is required viewing for anyone dismissive of young children’s moral-political autonomy.
Chapter 6
1. Samir Amin, “The Right to Education,” Pambazuka News 557 (November 10, 2011). Available from: http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/77838. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
2. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010), 239.
3. A pirated clip of this bit from a show in New York City (10/23/2012) may be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5_56uV8Xk8. (Accessed February 21, 2013). I heard him deliver it at the Merriam Theater, Philadelphia, PA, January 18, 2013. Louis C.K.’s website is https://buy.louisck.net/.
4. See my Dying to Teach: The Educator’s Search for Immortality (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).
5. John Marsh, Class Dismissed.
6. Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (New York: Crown, 2012).
7. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
8. For more on capitalism and monsters, see David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
9. Ben O’Brien, “G&A Exclusive: An Inside Look at Hornady Zombie Max Ammo,” Guns & Ammo (October 14, 2011). Available from: http://www.gunsandammo.com/2011/10/14/hornady-zombie-max-ammo/#ixzz2IphJKA1Q. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
10. Andy Campbell, “Zombie Bullets: Z-Max Ammunition Top Seller After Cannibal Attacks,” The Huffington Post, June 13, 2012. Available from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/13/zombie-bullets-z-max-ammunition_n_1594226.html. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
11. Translation altered by the author. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), 128-129.
12. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 9.
13. Definition available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downcycle. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
14. Libby Sander, “Freshman Survey: Even More Focused on Jobs,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 24, 2013. http://chronicle.com/article/Freshman-Survey-This-Year/136787/.
15. Note that in the U.S. the recipient of the right to education is broader than “the citizenry” as, via the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, all “persons” residing within the jurisdiction of the United States are eligible. The broadest consequence of this conception is that it has secured education rights for undoc- umented immigrant children. See Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982).
16. A classic analysis of this process during the advent of U.S. public schooling is Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform.
17. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation.
18. “…the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job 1: 20-21 (KJV).
19. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow and Henry Giroux, Disposable Youth.
20. Kenneth J. Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (New York: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 5.
21. Ibid.
22. Interview for Women’s Own (September 23, 1987). Interview transcript available from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydoc-ument.asp?docid=106689. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
23. See “Full Transcript of the Mitt Romney Secret Video,” Mother Jones (September 19, 2012). Available from: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video#47percent. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
24. This quote is widely attributed to Gandhi but the attribution lacks proof. The closest thing is perhaps this far more subtle, even dialectical, sentiment: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. …We need not wait to see what others do.” See Brian Morton, “False Words Were Never Spoken,” New York Times, August 29, 2011. Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/falser-words-were-never-spoken.html. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Citadel Press, 1956).
26. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 30.
27. Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World), 109.
28. Karl Marx& Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Available from: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm.
29. Ibid.
30. Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, 120.
31. Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (London: Verso, 2007), 91.
32. See Herman Cappelen, Philosophy Without Intuitions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
33. Michael Huesemann and Joyce Huesemann, Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save us or the Environment (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2011), 71f.
34. See Richard Martin, SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Robert Hargreaves, THORIUM: Cheaper than Coal (Createspace: 2012).
35. See the detailed report by the Global Campaign for Education, Gender Discrimination in Education: The Violation of Rights of Women and Girls (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women: A Johannesburg, South Africa: February 2012). Available from: http://campaignfore-ducation.org/docs/reports/GCE_INTERIM_Gender_Report.pdf.
36. Many ideas, proposals and activism news along these lines may be found at occupystudentdebt.com and occupystu - dentdebtcampaign.com.
37. See Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986).
38. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesoat Press, 1987), 4; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
39. I model this process as a kind of “contextualism” in my Democratic Education Stretched Thin, 99-115.
40. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 166.
41. Jason W. Moore, “Wall Street is a Way of Organizing Nature,” Upping the Anti 12 (2011), 42.
42. Foster et al.’s notion (from the later Marx of Capital Volume III) of “metabolism” and “metabolic rift” gestures toward this conception and is a welcome antidote to the anthro- pocentric myopia afflicting many Marxists. See Foster et al., The Ecological Rift. A more direct appreciation of the artifi- ciality of the society/nature divide may be found in Jason W. Moore, “The Socio-Ecological Crises of Capitalism,” in Sasha Lilley, ed., Capitalism and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 136-152. Moore writes that “in the world left today, in a sense we do see a convergence around a dialectical sense of how mature and society are interwoven. There was a time when industrial struggles in large factory settings were regarded as social and peasant struggles or conservation movements were seen as environmental. But in fact what we see today and nowhere more clearly than the ongoing struggles for justice around world agriculture, is a fusing of all of these moments. There is an emergent sensibility that Wall Street is a way of organizing global nature - every bit as directly as a farmer or mine albeit with specific forms.” (p. 138)
43. The reference is to historian Lynn White Jr.’s famous “stirrup thesis” in Medieval Technology and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) that the invention of the stirrup made feudalism possible owing to how central it made “the man on horseback” (i.e. mounted knight) and consequently the elaborate social structure necessary to maintain that expensive compound creature.
Chapter 7
1. “Barclays and the Limits of Financial Reform,”The Nation 295.5&6 (July 30/August 6, 2012), 9. These are the late author’s last words from his long running Nation column “Beat the Devil.”
2. See Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Hoare Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 175, n75: “Romain Rolland’s maxim ‘Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’ was made by Gramsci into something of a programmatic slogan as early as 1919, in the pages of Ordine Nuovo.” This is commonly said to be on the paper’s “masthead,” although a Google images search of actual editions of L’Ordine Nuovo seems not to confirm this.
3. “Dark Ecology,” Dark Mountain 3 (Croydon, UK: The Dark Mountain Project, Summer 2012), 23.
4. Here I am echoing Graham Harman’s categorization of the primary strategies for devaluing the ontological status of objects, what he calls “undermining” (their reality consists only in their sub-parts) and “overmining” (their reality consists only in the larger whole of which they are part). Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (London: Zero Books, 2011), 8-12.
5. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 5.
6. Ibid.
7. John Michael Greer provides a salutary antidote to the apocalyptic tendency, on this specific topic and generally. See The Long Descent and Apocalypse Not.
8. George S. Counts, Dare the School Build a New Social Order? (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978 [1932].
9. See http://www.whywaldorfworks.org/ and http://www.waldorflibrary.org/. (Both accessed February 21, 2013)
10. See http://www.reggiochildren.it/ and http://reggiochildren-foundation.org/. (Both accessed February 21, 2013)
11. See http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
12. There was a famous incident where the U.K’s Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) tried unsuccessfully to close down Summerhill. See Jessica Shepherd, “So, kids, anyone for double physics? (But no worries if you don’t fancy it): Official approval at last for school where almost anything goes,” The Guardian (November 30, 2007). Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/dec/01/ofsted.schools.
13. Blacker, Dying to Teach (New York: Columbia University Teachers College Press, 2007).
14. As reported by Mike Cole and Sara C. Motta, here is what truly substantive educational change looks like: “Pre- Chávez, Venezuela’s higher education system was notori- ously exclusionary and elitist, reproducing a culture of clientelism and personalism. Not surprisingly, it developed frameworks of education and learning that were heavily influenced by the dominant ideas of the West, and the US in particular. To counter this, one of 21st-century socialism’s central features is the extended role of the educative society, accompanied by mass intellectualism from birth to death (Chávez has described Venezuela as “a giant school”). A central objective of this is to develop the conditions for the production of autonomous and relevant ideas for the devel- opment needs of the majority of Venezuelans. It is also a means to overcome the traditional division of labour present within Venezuelan society and politics, in which there were thinkers (the dominant economic and intellectual elite) and doers (those who produced, yet were unable to control or receive the fruits of production). “Opinion: The Giant School’s Emancipatory Lessons,” Times Higher Education (March 11, 2011). Available from: http://www.timeshighere-ducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=414858. I thank Alpesh Maisuria for suggesting this.
15. James V. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141. Thanks to Eugene Matusov for this example.
16. William B. Irving, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 103.
17. John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, 9.
18. Ibid., 11.
19. Ibid., 9.
20. In Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), #104.
21. Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler,” On The Gambler (Capitol Records: Nashville, TN, 1978).
22. Blacker, Democratic Education Stretched Thin.
23. There are plenty of further examples. One might add certain versions of Marxism that have fueled a sense of destiny among adherents and, a very different sort of example, the Mongols of the Genghis Khan period (and later) who felt that it was divinely ordained that they should rule all peoples. In fact, it seems to me that this fatalism-activism combination is much more common than the fatalism-quiescence combi- nation, though the latter, I think, does exist - though, it seems more likely at the level of the individual psyche. Even there, though, there are famous counter examples like Stoicism, which is not known for generating passive types (more on Stoicism later).
24. Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 617c.
25. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
26. G. A. Cohen, “Historical Inevitability and Human Agency in Marxism,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 402.1832 (September, 1986), 77-78.
27. “What does the Spartacus League Want? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971 [1919]). Available from: http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm.
28. Robert C. Solomon, “On Fate and Fatalism,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 15, No. 4 (October 2003), 438.
29. Fragment #104, in Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). As quoted in Solomon, 445.
30. Robert C. Solomon, “On Fate and Fatalism,” 442.
31. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 270. Nietzsche is himself borrowing from one of the Roman poet Pindar’s Odes.
32. Robert C. Solomon, “On Fate and Fatalism,” 443-444.
33. Ibid., 452.
34. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Itinerary of a Thought,” New Left Review, 1.58 (November-December 1969). Available from: http://newleftreview.org/I/58/jean-paul-sartre-itinerary-of-a-thought.
35. Arthur Schopenhauer, Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press), 81.
36. Ibid.
37. Plato, Meno, in Five Dialogues, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 100b.
38. Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009).
39. Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us (1966),” in Sheldon Wolin, ed. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 91.
40. Hesiod, Works and Days, 90-105. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0132%3Acard%3D83
41. There is a wealth of sources to consult here. To get a flavor of the debate, I would recommend Chris Martenson, The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy and Environment (New York: Wiley, 2011) and his blog, Peak Prosperity, www.peakprosperity.com. There are also many relevant works by peak oil expert Richard Heinberg, such as Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2010). Two very active sites on peak oil are The Oil Drum: Discussions about Energy and Our Future, www.the oildrum.com, The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, www.peakoil.net, and the Post Carbon Institute, www.postcarbon.org. For a dissenting view, see Daniel Yergin, “There Will Be Oil,” The Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2011, available from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904060604576572552998674340.html; and his The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York: Penguin, 2012).
42. Chris Martenson, “The really, really big picture: There isn’t going to be enough net energy for the economic growth we want,” Post-Carbon Institute (January 13, 2013). Available from: http://www.postcarbon.org/blog-post/1402948-the-really-really-big-picture-there. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
43. Ibid.
44. Mark Lowen, “Crisis – hit Greeks Chop Up Forests to Stay Warm,” BBC News Europe, January 27, 2013. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21202432.
45. Derek Thompson, “How this Smoke Cloud Becomes the Ultimate Symbol of Greece’s Depression,” The Atlantic Cities, January 31, 2013. Available from: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/01/how-smoke-cloud-became-ultimate-symbol-greeces-depression/4561/.
46. Ibid.
47. This is a mash-up of lines from Seneca’s “On Anger” and “Consolation to Marcia,” available in Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, trans. John Davie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), compiled and placed together as “A Senecan Praemeditatio,” in Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 91.
48. Lucretius, The Nature of Things, trans. A. E. Stallings (New York: Penguin, 2007), BkI, 46-148.
49. See http://www.aahistory.com/prayer.html. (Accessed February 21, 2013)
50. This is a rewarding area of study, as there are easily available high quality translations (much of which can be found free online), and excellent scholarly secondary sources, including masterful works by A. A. Long, Brad Inwood, Pierre Hadot, John M. Cooper, Martha Nussbaum, and many others. Truly notable, though, is the recent spate of popular books (some by professional philosophers, some not). Among the most notable: Alan de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 2001), Jules Evans, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (London: Rider, 2012), William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), and (this is not a mistake), Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (New York: Harmony, 2009). This heterogeneity is consistent with ancient Stoicism as a school, which contained high-end philosophers like Chrysippus, more popular figures such as Seneca and politician and orator Cato the Younger, and also middle spectrum types, most famously the slave Epictetus, the Senator Cicero and the Emperor Marcus Aeurelius.
51. As quoted in Jules Evans, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, 70.
52. William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life, 68.
53. A point like this was made to me by the late philosopher Peter Winch. The story about Weil is related in Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (New York: Harper, 2005).
54. Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, 61.
55. Ibid. This line is attributed to a playwright contempora- neous with Seneca.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 62.
58. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 4.31.
59. Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, 71.
60. William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life, 77.
61. Lucretius, The Nature of Things, BkIII, 1044-1052.
62. Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009). http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/.
63. World Health Organization, “Health through safe drinking water and basic sanitation,” Project on Water Sanitation Health (2013). Available from: http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/mdg1/en/index.html.
64. “The Debtwatch Manifesto,” Steve Keen’s Debwatch, available from http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/01/03/the-debtwatch-manifesto/. (Accessed February 18, 2013)
65. I allude to James Hanson’s Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009).
66. Leon Trotsky, “Socialism or Barbarism (1917),” available from: www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol9/no6/trotsky.html.
67. Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, 59.
68. Hesiod, Works and Days, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 42.