The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame - Softcover

Blacker, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780995784 ISBN 13: 9781780995786

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The current neoliberal mutation of capitalism has evolved beyond the days when the wholesale exploitation of labor underwrote the world system’s expansion. While “normal” business profits plummet and theft-by-finance rises, capitalism now shifts into a mode of elimination that targets most of us—along with our environment—as waste products awaiting managed disposal. The education system is caught in the throes of this eliminationism across a number of fronts: crushing student debt, impatience with student expression, the looting of vestigial public institutions and, finally, as coup de grâce, an abandonment of the historic ideal of universal education. “Education reform” is powerless against eliminationism and is at best a mirage that diverts oppositional energies. The very idea of education activism becomes a comforting fiction. Educational institutions are strapped into the eliminationist project—the neoliberal endgame—in a way that admits no escape, even despite the heroic gestures of a few. The school systems that capitalism has built and directed over the last two centuries are fated to go down with the ship. It is rational therefore for educators to cultivate a certain pessimism. Should we despair? Why, yes, we should—but cheerfully, as confronting elimination, mortality, is after all our common fate. There is nothing and everything to do in order to prepare.
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Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

David Blacker is Professor of Philosophy of Education and Legal Studies at the University of Delaware.
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David Blacker is Professor of Philosophy of Education and Legal Studies at the University of Delaware.
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The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame

By David J. Blacker

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2013 David J. Blacker
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78099-578-6

Contents

Preface....................................................................
1
Introduction...............................................................
3
1 Endgames.................................................................
16
2 The tendency of the rate of profit to fall...............................
53
3 Upward instability and downward elimination..............................
89
4 Educational eliminationism I: Student debt...............................
122
5 Educational eliminationism II: Student voice.............................
150
6 Educational eliminationism III: Universal schooling disassembled.........
188
7 Fatalism, pessimism, and other reasons for hope..........................
221
Notes......................................................................
261
Index......................................................................
299

CHAPTER 1

Endgames

Capitalism is a suicide pact.

-Noam Chomsky1

Education and sustainability

My thesis is that the neoliberal endgame is precisely that, anendgame. The neoliberal phase of capitalism advances a series ofmoves the execution of which causes the game to end; uponcompletion of its final sequence the players cannot continue.Though ultimately merely a symptom, neoliberalism representscapitalism's moving beyond its traditional concern withextracting labor's surplus value, i.e. worker exploitation, into aposture of worker elimination and, ultimately, eliminationsimpliciter: we ourselves, future generations, and much other lifeon earth. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy isprofaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses,his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Thissearing sentence must once again be read in its most literal sense.

Traditional Marxist eschatology is thus correct to posit that,driven by its own contradictions, capitalism will finally enter aterminal phase. Yet few have understood until recently just howliterally that "terminal" needs to be taken. As the ideologicalexpression of the latest mutation of capitalism - a systemicallyhybridized monstrosity of state subsidy and oligarchic monopolism- at its deepest structural level neoliberalism amounts to anuncompromising thanatology. It is a death wish that has takenhold of our collective mentality. It will eliminate first the poorand otherwise vulnerable and then it will kill all of us as itdestroys the capacity of our planet to sustain human life. I meanthis not as hyperbole but as a sober extrapolation from presenteconomic and environmental trends. As John Bellamy Foster andcolleagues, in their study of capitalism's effect on theenvironment, warn: "the stability of the earth system as we knowit is being endangered. We are at red alert status."

There are more optimistic scenarios. But at the moment theseseem less probable. Unfortunately, sometimes it turns out thatthe news is bad and it may even lack the silver lining we seemalmost hardwired to try to locate. So many of us proceed like wedeserve a happy ending, as if by birthright. This sense of cosmicentitlement has a long intellectual history: from the Judaic self-understandingas God's "chosen" people, to the Aristotelian scalanaturae where humanity serves as biological telos, to theCalvinist-Puritan-American conviction that God will prosper hiselect, to today's suitably banal expectation for technological fixesthat "they" will figure out in order to deliver the Hollywoodhappy ending upon which "we" the audience insist. Humanbeings may even be hard-wired for a certain degree of psychologicalruddiness; speculative evolutionary rationales for thesurvival positivity of "high hopes" are easy to imagine (thoughdepression may have its own evolutionary rationale as well).But clearly optimism can delude, too. This calls to mindFriedrich Nietzsche's dangerous insight that at times truth can beinimical to life. "Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceivedreally less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous?" Thisattitudinal ambivalence pervades every worthwhile discussionof the realities of the neoliberal predicament in which we nowfind ourselves.

Take the critical notion of "sustainability" that is often quitereasonably offered in opposition to the present annihilative path.Every reasonable person should be in favor of sustainability. Butas a guide for action it can be misleading. Sustainability is largelya strategic notion. It tends to assume as static the desirability ofcertain outcomes and therefore frequently frames problems astechnical malfunctions needing appropriate technical fixes. If Idecry our present oil usage as "unsustainable," implicit in thatmessage is an imperative to locate an alternative energy source inorder to sustain the same activities fueled by the old energysource. What tends to be assumed is that our general way ofdoing things, our "lifestyle," needs to be preserved but by alternativemeans, in this case, say, by developing sources ofrenewable energy; we are not the problem, it is only our currentway of doing things that is to blame. As essayist Paul Kingsnorthpointedly puts it, "It means sustaining human civilization at thecomfort level that the world's rich people - us - feel is their right,without destroying the 'natural capital' or the 'resource base' thatis needed to do so." Admittedly, this is not what is meant by"sustainability" by our most enlightened activists (one hopes);nonetheless, it is what is heard by an ideologically degradedconsumer culture that ultimately sees itself as the universe'scenter.

In this crucial respect, the rhetoric of sustainability is inadequatefor describing the magnitude of what is at stake withneoliberalism and the comprehensive - and compounding damageit currently wreaks. The problem with "sustainability" inthe larger context of human survival is that it tends to understatematters. When resource depletion and environmental destructionare factored in, the neoliberal phase of capitalism is more thanmerely unsustainable. If it is allowed to play out its endgame, itwill not just alter our lives and cause us to seek new ways ofachieving what we currently desire. It will eliminate us, and whenwe exit, so will the sustainability question, as the question ofwhat is to be sustained and how to sustain "it" - namely, us - willno longer remain. In this sense, neoliberalism's endgame is notjust another problem for clever humanity to figure out and fromwhich to move on. In the parlance of our now endless war against"terror," it represents an existential threat, not a threat againstspecific practices or even our particular way of life as a whole. Itis a threat against life itself: our lives, certainly, and also muchother precious nonhuman life as well.

To illustrate the point, I could frame a life-or-death struggleagainst an assailant as a conflict over the "sustainability" of mylife. Once again this would be true but it is misleadingly understated.It would be more accurate to say that I am engaged in astruggle against being eliminated, where I may face the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1780995784
• ISBN 13: 9781780995786
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 319
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar