Shankar Gopalakrishnan

Amid political fractures, a global economic crisis and rising social tensions, this term of the United Progressive Alliance government is coming to an end. To many, there has been little to distinguish this period in Indian history, and indeed if anything it is marked by a lack of change. Yet the UPA period has been one of tensions and contradictions, a period that threw up in sharp relief some of the developing tendencies of the Indian polity. In the few days left before we deal with the results of the elections, it may be time to consider these tendencies. The hypothesis that emerges is both hopeful and disturbing: India’s ruling class appears to be heading towards an intensifying hegemonic crisis.

What does one mean by this? Hegemony, in Gramsci’s sense of the term, is the maintenance of ruling class power through a combination of coercion with the consent of the oppressed, won by a “concrete coordination” of the material interests of the ruling class bloc with other social sections. At its most basic, a hegemonic crisis is thus a crisis of legitimacy. But it is also more than that. Hegemony is not a one way flow between rulers and ruled, a deceit perpetrated by the one upon the other. If we accept the proposition that the capitalist state is a social relation, one function of which is to organise the ruling bloc of class fractions (Poulantzas 1978), hegemony provides the ideological facet of this relationship, serving to discursively define social power. While legitimating the power of the ruling bloc of class fractions, the hegemonic ideology also inherently defines for that ruling bloc who its legitimate members are, and provides an “explanation” for how it achieved that power. Second, by defining the parameters of thinking about society, it shapes the perspective and limits within which both the oppressed and the ruling class fractions approach the polity. What this means is that a hegemonic crisis produces not only a crisis of legitimacy; it also produces an increasing incoherence of the ruling bloc and its fractions, as the ideological frame that identified their common sociopolitical interests ceases to “work.” The net result is a disarticulation of social power, as both the legitimacy and the coherence of the dominant bloc deteriorate. My argument here is that we are witnessing a shift in this direction in India today, and the resulting conjuncture presents both dangers and possibilities for left and democratic forces.

The 2004 Elections

An analytical starting point for such an approach is the 2004 elections that brought the UPA to power. The ‘shock’ defeat of the NDA were both less and more significant than they were often believed to be at the time. It was less significant than it was made out to be by those who saw these elections as a decisive rejection of the NDA. The received “common sense” about this election, weaker now in light of the UPA’s pronounced neoliberal inclinations, was that this was a vote against “reforms” and, to a lesser extent, Hindutva. Indeed, for several months afterwards, the English media saw repeated and increasingly ludicrous attempts to defend neoliberal reforms against this perceived setback (“a revolution of rising expectations”, “it’s all anti-incumbency”, etc.).

Yet in fact the 2004 election results were by no means a ‘wave’ against the NDA. Though widespread and deep-rooted discontent existed, there was no political formation in the elections that focused such discontent beyond the regional and the issue-specific. The confusing result is best summarised by Yogendra Yadav: “The case that this was a mandate against policies of economic reforms is an overstatement… having said this, it is equally necessary to realise that… if this election could [have been] a referendum on economic reforms, the policies of liberalisation would have been rejected” (Yadav 2004). Nor was there any sense of an overwhelming defeat for the social bloc that had supported the NDA, a combination of upper castes and upper classes (Yadav 1999).

This reality, and the intensity with which the UPA has embraced neoliberalism, has led many on the left to argue that there was no significant difference between the two periods. But it is here that we underestimate the importance of 2004. For the consequence of an electoral result need not only be in direct shifts of political power; it can also operate at the discursive, ideological and political levels. In this sense, the elections of that year did indeed have a significant impact.

For a decisive defeat was indeed suffered in that year – not by the ruling coalition, but by the ruling class intelligentsia, and in particular by the key ideological forum of the “new India”: the English media. The defensiveness of neoliberals in the English media was not merely an overreaction. This intelligentsia had steadfastly predicted the return of the NDA and, in a symbiotic partnership with the bureaucracy and the party leadership, crafted the understanding whose preeminent symbol was “India Shining.” 2004 not only showed that this ideology had failed to secure hegemonic or even dominant status in Indian politics; it also demonstrated a more fundamental failure. Indeed, 2004 was both a transition for elements of the ruling bloc and a symptom of a deeper failure.

Hegemony and the Indian Neoliberal Project

In itself the media’s behaviour may seem nothing surprising. The alienation of the English media from India’s polity, and the solipsism and blindness of the elite it speaks for, are hardly anything new. Indeed, if anything 2004 was only a further exposé of what was already increasingly obvious.

But in a way this was precisely the reason why it was significant, for it hence had direct implications for the role that the English media has played in the rise of Indian neoliberalism. To discuss this role, it is first important to note that, in the absence of a political/institutional formation that has generated and defined Indian neoliberalism as an ideology (in contrast to Thatcherism, Reaganism, or other such forces), the effort to push neoliberalism as a political project in India has taken place in a far more diffuse and complex manner (1) . The functions that such a formation would play have, rather than being concentrated and organised, instead been dispersed to multiple centres of power in the Indian political system.

For instance, one such function – the individual policy changes and “reforms” that are required – has worked not through ‘public opinion’ or the legislative system, but instead through back door operations primarily focused in the bureaucracy (and, in cases that do require legislation, through “consensus” achieved by cross-party action through neoliberal elements without an organised formation). This was described by Rob Jenkins (1999) as a process of “reforms by stealth.”

A second such role, increasingly appropriate in a time of shifts towards accumulation by dispossession (for which see below), has been played by the judiciary. This has been the elimination and dilution of, on the one hand, legal protections for labour and criminal procedure, and, on the other, the strengthening and widening of state coercive powers over resources (forests and urban lands being the two most striking examples).

But a third – and in our context most important – function has been the evolution and projection of a hegemonic ideological project for neoliberalism in the Indian context. And it is here, arguably, that the English media has played a very different role than merely being an arena for ideological debate. Instead, the English media – with some exceptions of course – have largely begun to behave like the direct ideological propagators of a distinctly neoliberal political project. Delusional reporting about economic growth and general prosperity, contemptuous dismissal of other points of view, and a strong shift towards “campaign-style” reporting are among the indicators of this. To choose three examples, it is now difficult to read “news” in theIndian Express, the Times of India or the Hindustan Times on any topical issue that is not brazenly pushing an agenda – and it is rare for that agenda to be anything other than the “national good” as defined by the neoliberal approach.

In this context one is reminded of Gramsci’s (1971) remark “the intellectual General Staff of the organic party often does not belong to any of these fractions, but operates as if it were a decisive force standing on its own… [one can think of] a newspaper too (or group of newspapers), a review… as a “party” or a “fraction of a party” or a “function of a particular party.”” Indeed, since 1991, far more than any political formation, the projection of the policy priorities of neoliberalism has taken place through this function of the English media.

Yet, over the period of the NDA regime, this diffuseness of the Indian neoliberal project began to coalesce around a deepening, albeit temporary, alliance with Hindutva and the Sangh Parivar. The synthesis of neoliberalism and Hindutva promoted by the NDA was articulated, adjusted and defined by the English media, operating as “organic intellectuals” of the ruling bloc (2) . The ‘prediction’ of the NDA’s victory was both a ‘factual’ and a normative one; not only should the NDA win, it obviously would win because that was the natural outcome. Finally, “India Shining” was a remarkable melding of what was essentially a media strategy with an ideological vision that had already been articulated by the English media ad nauseam in the preceding years.

The Implications of Political Failure

In playing this role, however, the English media has not been serving as the intellectual “General Staff” or organic intellectuals of India’s entire bourgeoisie. Rather, as the standard bearer of the neoliberal project, it has functioned as the intellectual vanguard of finance capital, the fraction that has driven the neoliberal agenda and that is, in that sense, largely the dominant fraction in India’s ruling bloc.

But if one views the English media in this manner, the 2004 election defeat becomes not just an error in prediction, but a failure of an attempted political project. The fact that it was such a limited and partial defeat only increases the complexity of its implications. While there was no clarity on who or what actually led to the defeat, what was clear was that the hegemonic project being attempted had failed to explain India’s political reality.

It is here that one returns to the function of hegemony in terms of organising the ruling class bloc. The function of the dominant bloc’s intellectuals is not only to legitimise that dominance – it is to construct a vision of society that allows that bloc to understand its own dominance and to maintain it. What 2004 showed was that the ruling intelligentsia had not understood the sources of political power in Indian society. The result of the 2004 elections was thus a gap between the reality of continuing, if shaken, power for the dominant class fraction, and the inability of that power to devise an intellectual argument for itself.

The United “Progressive” Alliance: One Side of an Attempted Solution

One striking result of this disarticulation was to give the new UPA government a mild case of schizophrenia. The neoliberals retained and even strengthened their hold on traditional posts. Yet, simultaneously, the government initiated the process of preparing the CMP, which in turn became the basis for two new institutions: the National Advisory Council and the coordination committee with the Left parties. Neither the CMP process nor these new institutions reflected any major organised social interests; their direct political backing came only from the Left, whose support was a necessary but not sufficient condition for their activities. The importance of these institutions was not political, in the sense of state power, as much asintellectual. They were born out of the contradictory need to generate a new hegemonic project while simultaneously not affecting the interests of the ruling bloc and its dominant fraction, which after all remained in power (i.e. “reforms with a human face”). This institutional confusion in turn was the most apparent manifestation of the contradictions within the UPA’s stumbling attempts towards a new ideological project.

It was this space that generated both the possibilities and the limitations of the few progressive developments that did take place during the UPA’s regime. Two of the UPA’s flagship legislations are particularly good examples of the contradictions of this situation: the Employment Guarantee Act and the Forest Rights Act. Both laws challenged existing systems of state control in a significant manner, in the one case concerning finances and in the other on natural resources. Moreover, both laws were premised not on a process driven by state action, but one that both presumed and sought to generate popular action – in one case in the form of “employment on demand” and in the other through a gram sabha-based rights recognition process. Finally, both laws were pushed by informal alliances of local people’s movements, progressive elements in the Congress and other parties, and the Left.

The threat that this posed to the ‘old’ neoliberal ideology was apparent from the uncannily similar opposition that these laws faced. In both cases an alliance formed against the Bills consisting of sections of the bureaucracy (the Ministry of Finance for the EGA and the Ministry of Environment and Forests for the forest rights bill), part of the English media and a handful of “experts” (some economists and wildlife conservationists respectively). The bureaucacies provided the basic argument, the experts justified it with theories varying from the legitimate to the totally irrational, and the press utilized both to mount a campaign against these measures. Further, the arguments themselves were almost identical. Both legislations were described as attempting “distribution of national resources” in “handouts” to “the poor” for the sake of “vote banks.” Such “populist measures” would never bring “welfare” or “development” to the “beneficiaries”, as they would be hijacked by “corruption”. These measures would only keep people in “poverty” or “in the forests” instead of granting them a new and productive life (which in turn could only result from “growth”). In the process, the “nation” would be “immeasurably damaged.”

The anxiety of a dominant social group facing a process of democratisation, however limited, is apparent in these arguments; and it was clear that in both cases, it was not the laws themselves so much as the possibility of democratisation that was seen as the threat. Yet, these two legislations – both of which would have been essentially inconceivable under the NDA – survived, albeit in a mangled form, and were eventually passed (to the point where, ironically, the very same EGA is now being hailed as a “stimulus” for tackling the financial crisis). Why did this happen?

One can speculate that the reason was precisely the peculiar ‘radicalism’ of these legislations. First, as noted above, neither represented a powerful or organised political interest, and were driven in large measure through loose, informal coalitions exploiting the space created by the UPA’s “hegemonic vacuum”. Second, while both did involve degrees of systemic change, they did so in a fashion that did not directly and obviously threaten the short-term interests of the ruling class fractions. Instead, as laws that depended entirely on popular mobilisation, they opened political spaces that could be used by democratic forces, but which dominant elements could also try to block (which is precisely what is happening with both laws at the present moment). These laws are thus less a measure of resource redistribution than they are an effort to change the locus of resource decision-making.

Yet such changes themselves are, in the long term, a threat to the neoliberal project – particularly in the Indian context, for reasons explored below. Those who could visualise, conceptualise and coordinate the response to such a long term threat – the organic intellectuals of the ruling bloc – did in fact attempt to do so, along with the more far-sighted members of the ruling class. But for the ruling bloc to fully respond to such challenges required a shared ideological approach, which was precisely what was in question. As a result, when no major fraction of the ruling bloc was directly threatened and all saw themselves as able to deflect these challenges, a constrained space opened for political action.

A similar pattern repeated itself in most of the other efforts by social forces to produce progressive results during the early years of the UPA. One can see the sharp contrast when such efforts did directly confront interests of ruling fractions – the alacrity with which the entire notion of private sector reservations was dispatched being a good example.

But this attempt at a “human face” was only part of the response to 2004, the part that indicated a transition in the function of the ruling intelligentsia. The other part, which built on tendencies that predated 2004, will arguably have a far greater impact.

The Other Response: The Use of Force

While 2004 is a convenient inflexion point for analytical purposes, it is clear that these processes did not begin in 2004. Indeed, as early as the late 1990’s, it was already clear that the neoliberal political offensive was finding it increasingly difficult to devise a concrete coordination of interests that would allow its dominant fraction – finance capital – the full transformation of the Indian polity that it desires. This ultimately reflects the nature of India’s political economy, and more proximately is a consequence of the lack of an organised institutional-political force (a party in the broad sense) pushing the Indian neoliberal project (3) . By this period, the financial press had begun to lament the inability to push through the remaining “big ticket” reforms, such as:

• Dismantling of labour laws;
• Withdrawal of food subsidies and withdrawal of the PDS;
• Privatisation of all major public sector enterprises;
• Withdrawal of fertiliser and other subsidies to agriculture;
• Complete liberalisation of FDI, particularly in sectors such as retail.

In each of these areas, utinroads, dilutions and sabotage have occurred, but the wholesale destruction of these regulatory and institutional mechanisms has not been achieved. Around this period, then, a shift began to occur away from reforms aimed at deregulation and towards reforms aimed at expropriation.

What does one mean by this? Since the late 1990’s, the major new initiatives in Indian neoliberalism have been in the area of what David Harvey (2003) described as “accumulation by dispossession” (or “accumulation by encroachment”, in Prabhat Patnaik’s (2005) terminology). This process, integral to capitalism at all times, is accentuated under neoliberalism, where both State assets and the assets of small commodity producers (such as peasants and artisans) become far easier to seize as a result of deflationary and ‘rollback’ policies. A classic instance is the huge increase in mining activity. As of 2006, the Orissa government had already signed two lakh crore worth of mining projects in the two years since the BJD-BJP regime’s current term began. As of 2007, the Jharkhand government had over 54 Memoranda of Understanding for steel and power plants pending. Meanwhile, over five lakh hectares of forest land – at a rate three times higher than the preceding two decades – were diverted for various projects between 2001 and 2006, with much of this land being transferred for free to private companies. The number of industrial projects requiring state acquisition of land or resources has rapidly increased. Meanwhile, in addition to such direct use of state coercion, the collapse of credit for agriculture became a parallel process of intensifying extraction of resources.

In a sense this “strategy” has succeeded: between 2000 and 2005-2006, the share of private corporate savings in total capital formation doubled from 6% to 12%, and exceeded that of household savings for the first time (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2007). In the same period, corporate surplus rose from 12% to 16% of national income. Meanwhile, the results of a Business World (2008) survey are indicative: prior to the financial crisis, seven of India’s ten most profitable companies were either real estate or mining corporations.

The corporations that engaged in and promoted such strategies – Reliance, the Tatas, the Adanis etc. come to mind – are in many ways precisely the dominant class fraction in Indian capital. By adopting such an approach, they had already begun a process of increasingly emphasising the moment of coercion within hegemony while de-emphasising the moment of consent. Reflecting the inability to produce a political project that would concretely coordinate their desire for super-profits with mass consent, they instead began to attempt to bypass resistance at the national and political level and to seek “short cuts” to more direct expropriation.

For instance, the most glaring example – state land acquisition for big projects – is a classic avenue of expropriation that does not require long term political support. Acquisition of this kind can operate on a short term, region-specific basis that does not require policy changes. Moreover, the subjects that most directly pertain to such strategies – land, water, forests, law and order, and so on – all either come only or mostly (forests) under the State governments. This, combined with the impoverishment of the States as a result of the Finance Commission awards and similar mechanisms, makes it much easier for corporates to simply demand and receive windfall profits through state action.

Prior to 2004, this strategy was used in a relatively ad hoc manner on specific projects, even as its overall impact was increasingly visible in the crisis in agriculture. But the 2004 “defeat” of the neoliberal intelligentsia was a further reflection of the weakness of the neoliberal political project and, therefore, presumably increased the “attractiveness” of coercive expropriation.

Indeed, even as an attempt was being made to shape “reforms with a human face” under the UPA and the political schizophrenia noted above was underway, a simultaneous shift in the opposite direction was also taking place. The best indicator of this shift, and arguably the most politically significant “innovation” of this regime, is the 2005 SEZ Act. A close reading of this Act and Rules clearly indicates that these zones have little to do with exports and nothing to do with employment generation (their two most commonly cited justifications). Rather, they are an extreme version of the Chinese SEZ concept, wherein the entire state machinery of a territory is effectively handed over to private capital. Indeed, the only effective requirement for setting up an SEZ in India is possession (or even the possibility of possession, with state assistance) of sufficient land area. Within this area, in a brazen and unconstitutional manner, the law effectively creates an administrative machinery where the “Developer” corporate and a few agencies of the Central government are the sole governing, regulatory and economic authorities. Everything from public infrastructure to municipal governance is left to these institutions. The result is an ideal space for coercive, extractive accumulation by big capital with access to speculative finance, and indeed the Act’s minimum land area stipulations are a particularly crude way of distinguishing between such capitals and smaller ones (much to the chagrin of smaller IT companies, for instance). The favoured neoliberal ‘solution’ to the resultant conflict is to allow for “market purchase of land”, which not only fails to take into account the reality of land markets in India and does not address speculation through change of land use, but also ignores the fact that the possibilities for coercive accumulation are not limited to initial real estate speculation. The SEZs institutional systems ensure that these would include continued extraction of surplus from workers, smallholders and residents through the Developer’s powers over infrastructure, security and land use, as well as large scale profiteering from subsidies and tax exemptions.

The SEZ Act thus effectively creates a legal and institutional structure for accumulation by dispossession, allowing it to be generalised beyond individual projects and corporates and made into a regime of accumulation accessible to big capital in general. Instead of attempting a neoliberal transformation of the state machinery as a whole, the Act creates a “shortcut” of extremely pro-capital institutions within defined small territories. This is effectively the institutionalisation of accumulation by dispossession as a strategy.

The SEZ Act was the most explicit manifestation of this political approach, but by the second half of the UPA government – from around 2006, for instance – it was clear that this had won the day against new efforts to devise a hegemonic ideology. Symbolised by the de facto dissolution of the NAC, and then later by a brazen embrace of US foreign policy, the dominant fraction of the ruling bloc appeared to have taken a final decision that the use of force and systematic “bypassing” of political institutions was more effective and more worthwhile than attempts at trying to win consent for its actions. This in turn was reflected in the collapse of practically all progressive statements and actions by the UPA. Even as they found the hegemonic fusion of neoliberalism and Hindutva in Gujarat under Narendra Modi to be ideal (symbolised by the sickening endorsement of Modi as the future Prime Minister), the Ambanis, the Mittals, the Tatas and their ilk had clearly decided that, if they cannot have that, immediate gains from robber baron expropriation are preferable to building consent.

Shadows of a Crisis

Yet this ‘choice’ is once again only a reflection of the growing fragility of the hegemonic project of this ruling bloc. For this is a self-interested, short term choice of the dominant fraction, a choice from which even smaller capitals – who cannot so easily utilise structures for accumulation by dispossession, and therefore face unfair competition – will not benefit. As a result, it will both exacerbate tensions within the ruling bloc as well as accelerate the trend towards an overall hegemonic crisis, with its attendant implications for the stability of domination by this fraction. A glaring instance is the SEZ Act’s incredible tax exemptions, which constitute a resource transfer so huge that even ideological neoliberals in the Finance Ministry have found it difficult to stomach.

In the meantime, the global financial crisis is likely to have contradictory impacts. On the one hand it greatly weakens the dominant fraction and its strategy (as indicated by moves to get SEZs denotified). On the other, the neoliberals have sufficiently linked India’s economy to international finance that the crisis has had significant and immediate negative impacts, both directly through rapid declines in export sectors and real estate / construction and indirectly through a sharp decline in international prices, particularly of agricultural produce (Ghosh 2009). This is only likely to produce further discontent and anger, accelerating a sense of hegemonic vacuum.

The shadows of the hegemonic crisis are already reflected in various aspects of the polity. At the formal political level, whereas 2004 was marked by a clear political project (the NDA’s neoliberal-Hindutva synthesis) opposed by diffuse resistance, 2009 is marked by an open acknowledgment by all concerned – including the neoliberal media – that no political force can hope to secure a clear mandate. The fractious shifts within coalitions and resulting ‘instability’ reflect the lack of faith any political formation has in effectively deploying any hegemonic project, new or old.

At the level of popular struggle, the last four years have seen an expansion of new forms of popular action as well as more brutal types of repression. Some struggles, such as those of POSCO and Nandigram, declared de facto ‘liberated zones’, operated and controlled by direct ‘people’s power’ institutions. Indeed it is no accident that three of the largest of such protests – Nandigram, Singur and Lalgarh – have taken place in West Bengal, a state where the hegemonic crisis is perhaps most acute, given the total swing to big capital by the Left Front government and the resulting collapse of space for dissent and resistance. These new forms of protest in turn reflect a lack of faith in more institutional forms of political action and a complete collapse of the legitimacy of the state. They show strong parallels to similar situations in Latin America (such as the Oaxaca Commune), where, too, a hegemonic crisis has resulted from a neoliberal offensive.

The response of the state has also, however, accelerated. Strategies once reserved for “peripheries” in Mizoram and Kashmir, such as state-sponsored militias and strategic hamleting, have found their place in the mainland with Salwa Judum. In Kashmir itself, the Israel-style massacres of protesters in August was on a level unprecedented since the early years of the uprising, and the confrontation all the more remarkable for the decision of the protesters to not engage in violence of any kind. Following the November Mumbai carnage, the UPA has also institutionalised – in the form of the National Investigative Agency and the reincarnated anti-terror laws – a new security infrastructure that will make repression more centralised, and possibly more intense.

Possibilities and Constraints

The fact that tendencies towards a crisis are present does not, of course, make it certain that the crisis will actually occur. What it does make clear, however, is that the Indian polity is in a fluid and complex situation where the boundaries of both conflict and possibility will be wider than before. The polity appears to be moving into a qualitatively new phase, and whatever resolution is eventually achieved, it will be most likely based on a broad reconfiguration.

This situation offers both challenges and possibilities to democratic and left forces. Firstly, the tendency towards coercive action by the state will greatly increase as the resort to force becomes more and more necessary to cover up fractures in hegemony. Secondly, a continued focus on accumulation by dispossession – if perhaps at a slower rate in the short term – will increase the number of people who are physically displaced, expropriated or forced to migrate. Such people have generally been much more difficult for left forces to organise.

Thirdly, the Sangh Parivar, while not capable of immediately offering a hegemonic project at the national level, is better organised, has a larger reach and has a more coherent political project than the scattered and fragmented left forces in the country. It also has the advantage of an inherent strong resonance between its project and the goals of the dominant fraction of the ruling bloc, reflected in the hegemonic alliance operating in Gujarat. Finally, displaced and otherwise mobile but disenfranchised groups have historically been a main target of Sangh organising. If we on the left do not act swiftly, one consequence of this fluid situation may be a rapid expansion and consolidation in the Sangh’s strength.

But this should not blind us to the possibilities that exist in this situation. A hegemonic crisis is at the end of the day a product of the class struggle, a struggle that may not yet be consciously or coherently organised but which is driving the current situation. A hegemonic crisis offers the opportunity to push political positions that would otherwise be automatically excluded by hegemonic understanding. Since the ruling class is no longer “setting the agenda”, we now have the space to move beyond defensive and reactive positions and to offer programmatic changes, even from a position of relative political weakness. To use Gramsci’s terminology, this is a time when the war of position accelerates, even if one is not yet able to convert it into a war of maneuver. Even when one cannot confront the core interests of the ruling bloc, it is possible to occupy spaces and alter discourses more effectively now than perhaps at any time since the 1980’s.

It is not a window we are likely to get often; and it is not one that we can afford to lose.

Shankar Gopalakrishnan is an activist of the Campaign for Survival and Dignity, a national platform of tribal and forest dweller mass organisations struggling for the rights of forest communities. He has written on forest policy, tribal rights, law, development, communalism, Special Economic Zones and neoliberal economic policies. His academic training is in development studies and mathematics.

Notes

(1) The reasons why such a formation does not exist is not something I am going into here. There is a partial discussion on this issue in Gopalakrishnan 2008.

(2) Please see Gopalakrishnan 2006 for more discussion on this aspect.

(3) This area is discussed more in Gopalakrishnan 2008.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Business World (2008). “Top 100 Most Profitable Companies”, Business World. October 27th.

Chandrasekhar, C.P and Ghosh, Jayati (2007). “Who is Doing the Saving and Investing?”, Macroscan.org, May 11.

Ghosh, Jayati (2009). “A Policy of Neglect”, Frontline, January 31.

Gopalakrishnan, Shankar (2006). “Defining, Constructing and Policing a ‘New India’: Exploring the Relationship Between Neoliberalism and Hindutva”, Economic and Political Weekly. Mumbai: Sameeksha Trust, June 30.

Gopalakrishnan, Shankar (2008). “Neoliberalism and Hindutva: Fascism, Free Markets and the Restructuring of Indian Capitalism”, Radical Notes Series, Delhi: Aakar Books.

Gramsci, Antonio (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Harvey, David (2003). “New Imperialism: Accumulation By Dispossession,” Socialist Register 2004, pp. 63-87.

Jenkins, Rob (1999). Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Patnaik, Prabhat. (2005). “The Economics of the New Phase of Imperialism,” Macroscan.org, August 26.

Poulantzas, Nicos (1978); tr. Camiller, Patrick. State, Power, Socialism. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Reprinted by Verso in 2000.

Yadav, Yogendra with Heath, Oliver; Kumar, Sanjay (1999). “The BJP’s New Social Bloc”, Frontline. Chennai: Kasturi and Co., November 19.

Yadav, Yogendra (2004). “The Elusive Mandate of 2004”, Economic and Political Weekly. Mumbai: Sameeksha Trust, December 18.

Spyros Lapatsioras, Leonidas Maroudas, Panayotis G. Michaelides, John Milios and D. P. Sotiropoulos 

In the third chapter of Capital, Marx observed: “As long as the social character of labour appears as the money existence of the commodity and hence as a thing outside actual production, monetary crises, independent of real crises or as an intensification of them, are unavoidable. It is evident on the other hand that, as long as a bank’s credit is not undermined, it can alleviate the panic in such cases by increasing its credit money, whereas it increases this panic by contracting credit” (Marx 1991: 649).

As we know, financial crises are sometimes the prelude to, and sometimes the result of, a crisis of over-accumulation of capital. Sometimes, again, the financial crisis manifests itself independently of the broader economic conjuncture, that is to say does not have any significant effect on the level of profitability and the level of employment of the “factors of production” in the other sectors of the economy above and beyond the financial sphere or some specific parts of it.(1) This, for example, is what happened in the case of the international financial crisis of 1987, when there was a collapse of share prices in the international stock exchanges, providing the international press with the opportunity to speak of a “return to 1929 and the Great Depression”. But it is also what happened in most of the more than 124 crises in the banking system that were recorded between 1970 and 2007.

It is thus evident that each specific financial crisis must be examined both in relation to its particular characteristics and in relation to its interaction with other spheres of economic activity and the wider economic conjuncture, before it becomes possible to draw conclusions as to its causes, its extent and its consequences.

We shall argue that the current crisis is the outcome of permanent characteristics of capitalist relations of production and reproduction, but also of characteristics that are peculiar to the core of the neoliberal organization of this relation, that is to say to the core of the present form of appearance of capitalist relations of production.

1. Factors in the crisis

1.1 Some basic points from Marx

Marx showed in Capital that capitalism is not simply a system for extracting surplus labour or appropriating surplus product (the extraction of surplus labour and appropriation of surplus product are characteristics ofevery class society: the slave-owning society, the feudal, the Asiatic…). The distinguishing feature of capitalism is that the process of generating surplus product takes the form of money producing more money as an end in itself. In this context money is not a “produced commodity” as was believed by Classical Political Economy (and as is maintained even today in Ricardian readings of Marx) but the “reification of the capital relation”.

Money is thus produced in accordance with the dynamics of expanded reproduction of the capital relation, first and foremost as credit money, as discounting of the future, as the present portion of future profitabilityand by extension future income. Thus, capitalism is “a system of production, where the entire continuity of the reproduction process rests upon credit” (MEW 25: 507. Marx-Internet 1894, Ch. 30). “This social character of capital is first promoted and wholly realized through the full development of the credit and banking system… The banking system shows, furthermore, by substituting various forms of circulating credit in place of money, that money is in reality nothing but a particular expression of the social character of labour and its products” (MEW 25: 620. Marx-Internet 1894, Ch. 36).

The financial system is thus a basic lever for expanded reproduction of overall social capital.

One essential element in the functioning of the financial system is “economic time”, the difference between present and future value, that is to say the expectation of future profitability (of future returns) on which present discounting is dependent. The tendency towards expansion of the monetary means that are called upon to function as capital in accordance with the expected future production and profit is an inherently unstable element of the system, a perennial potential for financial crisis.

One significant component of present-day developments in the sphere of credit and finance, not unrelated to the breakdown in the system of fixed exchange rates and internationalization and liberalization of financial markets, is the development of financial derivatives. Through financial derivatives there is a mingling, a linkage and a comparison in profitabilities at the international level between every type of financial security. International capitalist competition is sharpened, with corresponding intensification of the international mobility of capital and the pressure imposed on labour for increased “international competitiveness”.(2)

1.2 The neoliberal model for regulation of financing

Present-day developments in the financing process date from the beginning of the 1980s and have their origins in abolition of the restrictions that had been imposed after the crisis of 1929 on banks, the international movement of capital and the mode of operation of stock exchanges (particularly in London and the USA). In other words, they have their origins in the emergence of what is called the neoliberal framework for regulation of the financial sphere. We say regulation and we do not use the usual term “deregulation” because in the neoliberal model there is no abolition of regulation, nor in the final analysis of the guarantees provided by the collective capitalist (the state) for such functioning of the financial system as is right and proper for accumulation. The post-war “Keynesian” regulation (Bretton Woods) was merely replaced by a different kind of regulation that is compatible with the functions required by the neoliberal model of the financial system. A comprehensive framework of rules and regulations for the financial system is in operation today. For example, the functioning of the central banks as technical centres for underwriting the operations of the money markets and the credit system, is carried out through a broad mesh of regulations, rules and hierarchies, and the procedure for decision-making beyond the boundaries of democratic legitimacy in itself comprises a major systemic reform. Another example is Basel I and II as systems for regulating the behaviour of banks that are under the control of the central bank, etc.

The basic characteristic of the regulatory framework for the financial sphere – which is a structural characteristic and core component of the neo-liberal model – is the development of extra-bank (i.e. non-traditional) financing of the public debt and enterprises by the international markets. The enterprises, at first large internationally active ones but with subsequent extension to medium-sized companies of suitable creditworthiness, finance their activities mostly through non-traditional sources of banking credit. They issue short-term commercial paper, sometimes using the stock exchange, sometimes resorting to a variety of non-bank financial arrangements (including insurance funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, insurance companies and a whole constellation of special forms of capital) entered into for this purpose. It is not only business companies that subsequently acquire access to non-bank financing and risk-management facilities but also those seeking housing loans, student loans, loans for the purchase of a car, credit cards, loans taken out by municipalities, etc.

This financing model presupposes securitization of debt and international mobility of capital, that is to say the bringing into existence of an international space of multiple investment spheres for individual and isolated capitals, a space whose functioning makes these prerequisites into expanded consequences. The financial markets have developed into a complex multi-dimensional system. They are not just money markets, bond markets, share markets, currency markets and commodity markets. They also include a rights market and a market in fixed-income securities and every other kind of security. As a result, an international of capital has come into existence that is permanently on the lookout for secure profits and self-valorization of money. Members of this International are combing the planet in search of reliable returns. Reliable returns in the sense that risk management (that is to say the probability of the expected return not being achieved) are the basic concern in an international market where multiple divergent forces are determining returns. It is a complex technique that prides itself on being a science.

From Marx we know that capitalist relations of production are engaged in expanded self-reproduction. And the minimum element constituting that process is a claim to appropriation, a title of ownership of value and the terms of its production, a promised appropriation of surplus value. Securitization of claims on future value and surplus value is thus unequivocally an element in the capital relation. Its reproduction amounts to a perpetual production of securities and a perpetual endeavour to overcome resistances of the valorization process, resistances that stem from “nature” and from labour: to overcome resistance in the potential spheres of utilization and to overcome resistance to profitability created by other capitals. Risk management is incorporated into the production process precisely because there can be no assured outcome of any struggle against something that is resisting. What we see as risk management is therefore nothing other than the continuation by other means of the everyday class war against labour in the sphere of production, the continuation by other means of the everyday war between capitals whose aim is to secure the normal rate of profit in an international sphere of investment. Securities markets and risk management techniques have always been part of the same logic as the class power of capital and the wars that it wages.

Τhe neo-liberal model for financing capitalist production and reproduction played an important role in facilitating resurgence from the crisis of overaccumulation that made its appearance in the 1970s and continues to have an important function for capitalist accumulation and expanded reproduction.(3) The crisis had made its appearance at the beginning of the 1970s as a crisis of stagflation with increased unemployment and underemployment of the accumulated capital. The cause of these phenomena, i.e. the substantial outcome of the crisis of overaccumulation, was the fall in the rate of profit in the countries of developed capitalism that occurred in consequence of the overall pattern of social contradictions and antagonisms. These have rendered superfluous a section of the accumulated means of production.(4)

The functioning of the financial system and the means by which it is activated (for example the various forms of security) do not comprise merely vehicles for speculative investments. They are much more so components of a mechanism that makes a decisive contribution to the mobility of individual capitals, establishing the conditions for their competition. It thus functions as a key link in the reproduction of overall social capital.Exposing individual capitals to international competition for financing of their activities makes it possible for there to be rapid reward of profitable, and punishment of insufficiently profitable, investments.

This function has contributed, and continues to contribute, to transformation of banking activity because of the change in the correlation of forces between banks and the money market. More specifically, and as always in relation to our subject, the process of liberalization of the financial system had significant consequences for the functioning of the banks, which may be summarized as follows:

(a) Bonds and shares are both securities. But, in order for them to be able to act as sources of finance for individuals or insurance funds or other non-traditional banking institutions, businesses or private citizens (for example with housing loans, etc.) other forms of securitization of debt must be developed. Securitization of debt has become an important process. It has contributed both to the emergence of the contemporary credit system and to its current crisis.

(b) The various non-bank financial schemes in operation on the international capital markets are not afflicted with the regulative restrictions that apply for banks, and are able to lend money at low rates of interest. This has had consequences for the functioning and the structure of the banking system. The new arrangements have squeezed bank profits and changed the composition of their workload, i.e. led to an increase in loans to households and loans to cover consumer and housing expenditures and a reduction in loans to businesses.

Consequently, with the gradual reform of the system, the banks were led into increased securitization as a means of expanding their turnover. They turned to securing commission from financial facilitation as a source of profit. When a person takes out a loan she is required to secure a certain amount of capital so that there will be some guarantee in the event of the borrower’s non-observance of her obligations. But this diminishes her prospects of lending money herself because she is obliged to tie up a certain amount of capital. If someone sells the loan, that is to say issues a security whose holder receives the cash flow from the loan, firstly she is not required to tie up capital, secondly she is able to withhold a proportion of the cash flow as commission for issuing the security and so to find a different source of profit, which is directly dependent on the extension of credit that is thereby achieved, that is to say the number of loans that are issued. This nevertheless entails some restrictions. Firstly, in general the expansion of credit contributes to a rise in property values; secondly, the increase in interest rates affects the value of existing securities in the event of conversion into cash or in the event that they are used as collateral for the purpose of obtaining cash. This poses potential dangers of disturbance to the credit system, leading the monetary authorities to judge that they should raise interest rates. Low interest rates, by contrast, facilitate the expansion of credit, under some conditions beyond the limits set by the requirements of capitalist production.

As for the form taken by household finance, it should be borne in mind that competition between individual capitals is conducted through profitable investments exploiting innovations and seeking out unexploited regions or regions that can provide an advantage by comparison with other individual capitals. Banks are not exempt from this rule. Intensified competition in lending to households, insofar as such loans have now come to account for a significant proportion of bank profit, is the basis for issuance of subprimes and other equivalent types of loan, and the basis for effective exploitation of this type of loan within the overall process of securitization.

(c) Liberalization has led to excessive expansion of certain banks involved in international transactions which – though for some they represent outmoded practice – are very important nodal points, not only from the viewpoint of scale of transactions and obligations but also from that of the links they maintain within the overall context of the international financial system.

(d) Moreover, given the development of “over the counter” (OTC) markets, of various off-shore companies, the development of “Special Purpose Vehicles” (SPVs), of different money markets, bonds, securities, swaps, etc., or in other words the development, in general, of international activities utilizing a complex network of financial transactions and money flows that are mostly evading all supervision and/or oversight, the system has become more intricate and complex. At the same time the development of new forms of finance (for example derivatives) has resulted in complex models of pricing and credit risk assessing that depend on parameters for which in all likelihood no data exists. To the extent that information does exist it is likely to be very vulnerable to small changes (to say nothing of its inability to incorporate or measure potential risks and uncertainties created by the complexity of this network of relationships within the capitalist process of production and reproduction). Moreover, in contrast to the ideologies of abolishing the role of the intermediaries what is conspicuous in the current crisis is the emergence of new intermediaries and a network of multiple interlinkages entirely lacking in transparency.

Finally, the emergence and consolidation of the neo-liberal model did not take place from one day to the next. It did not appear as a comprehensive ready-made model but as a process of gradual elaboration taking into account failures, successes and the shifting environment. It did not automatically gain currency in all countries. It appears to have begun to be propagated, though still sometimes in a desultory fashion, following its rise to supremacy in the United States and Britain. For reasons that have to do both with the history of its emergence and with the mode of articulation of international networking, the USA and, to a less extent, Britain have been the centres of the international financial sphere, from which tools, innovations, organizational forms, etc. have been propagated to the rest of the international system. Thus one element at the core of the model is this complex articulation of relations whereby Wall Street (along with other financial centres in the USA) and the City of London have functioned as a centre for dissemination of new regulations and forms of organization of the financial system.

2. The relationship between the financial system and other elements comprising the core of neo-liberalism

The development of the financial system under neoliberal hegemony is linked to other basic elements comprising the core of the neoliberal model. We will be brief.

i) One declared objective has been to “deregulate” the labour market as a means of reducing the power of wage-earners to demand wage increases and better terms of employment. This has been pursued both by repressive methods and through monetaristic policies for fighting inflation, and has led to a significant increase in unemployment. It has also been pursued through the weapon of disciplining the behaviour of business and states that is made available through neoliberal money markets. Here it should be noted that monetaristic policies of high interest rates at the beginning of the 1980s, apart from significantly boosting unemployment, also had the result of generating a significant sphere for investment of international capital: higher levels of state indebtedness.

(ii) Moreover – and in one aspect a continuation of (i) – international trade and outsourcing, that is to say the exposure to international competition for the purpose of devaluing and excluding insufficiently valorized (=non-competitive) capital, are predicated, among other things, on the freedom of movement of capital along with the rest of the neoliberal complex of financial regulation (non-bank financing, development of differentiated international financial markets). These elements have been mechanisms for schooling labour in the requirements of capitalist restructuring and continuing accumulation. Confining ourselves to the effects that non-bank financing of businesses has had, we detect some significant effects on the mode of operation of these businesses, particularly those that have access to money markets. To name just a very few: Firstly, we see an increase in company debt in relation to the capital, insofar as the debt increases the profitability of the capital and so sends signals of profitability to the money markets. Secondly, for regular continuation of financing it is demanded that every enterprise have high profit indicators – every suspicion of insufficient valorization increases the risk of burdensome terms of financing and reduces the companies’ competitive potential (e.g. increases the risk of its being taken over). Thirdly, shares do not comprise the key measure for financing of enterprises but are raw materials for buyouts and mergers. In other words there is a handling of cash flows and sale and repurchase decisions with shares that increases the share prices (which can play a role in accumulation when what is required is investment that will have a long-term yield). The trade unions, indeed working people in general, experienced these results as loss of bargaining positions. The argument was and is simple: “accept what we propose, otherwise the company will lose its potential for financing”. In this case, for example, doubts will be generated as to its profitability and there will be danger of it being bought out, with resultant loss of workplaces, or of the production chain being restructured and a part of the chain transferred to other countries.

(iii) Privatization of sectors of state activity and change in the composition of state activities. Expansion of the space for investment of individual capital is another central element in the neoliberal model. Privatizations are an important factor in bringing about a broadening of the financial sphere. This too has consequences for wage-earners. At a minimum there is a requirement for increased financing of individual needs as distribution “free of charge” is replaced by commodities which have a price (or insofar as the method of costing changes when they pass into the control of private capital). As a result, a basis is created for an increase in the debt of households that have access to the banking system; but the potential is also generated for penetration, when required, by banks into new sectors of the market, such as, for example, student loans. Within the same logic as privatization and greater sanctification of profit is reduction of tax for businesses that contribute to maintenance of high levels of state debt. Reforms to the insurance system have introduced noteworthy pursuers of risk-free profits (insurance companies, mutual capital, hedge funds, etc.) into the company of the banks and so have evidently brought new pressures to bear on wage earners.

(iv) The securing of consent to the neoliberal model was underwritten by the possibility of access to cheap loans (in order to finance consumer spending or housing or other expenditure) and by participation in this global hunt for profits (among the most conspicuous examples of such participation being the private insurance funds or mutual funds). In this way, the withdrawal of the state from funding universal insurance systems for health, education, social services, etc., will be eased. Accordingly, the seeking out of potential borrowers, that is to say the incorporation into the credit system of certain groups in the population is not merely the result of the greed of the banks and all types of investor but an injunction that is part of the scheme of neoliberal regulation. The privately-owned home as a dream that could be made to come true by virtue of neo-liberal financial regulation became a declared goal of all representatives of the model. The privately-owned home as an item of property became a means for access to other facilities of the credit system.

From a different viewpoint, the squeeze on wages, a result and objective of the neoliberal model, also put a squeeze on consumer expenditure, such that the introduction of appropriate measures to facilitate consumer credit became an escape-route for the system, a solution to the problem of managing aggregate demand on the part of the collective capitalist. Today’s crisis exposes the difficulties involved in this solution for management of aggregate demand and for organization of consent to the neoliberal programme. In the place of subprimes one can very readily imagine problems with securities from credit cards and quite likely tomorrow securities from student loans, etc.

3. Banks, housing loans and securitization

The securitization of housing loans can be understood as being part of a production chain. Let us describe it, employing a minimum of “links”.

As raw material we have a form of debt that is accompanied by certain guarantees. The greater the guarantees the greater can be the debt. The bank that issues the loan is required to hold some capital against the loan. Transferring the debt to a third party it can release the capital and start the whole process again. Its profit from the expansion of credit is the commission it receives from ceding credit to a third party. The third party can be another bank or a special purpose company (SPV) (5). Let us suppose that it is a special purpose company. It gathers together the loans in the form of securities describing a cash flow (instalments) with mortgages as collateral. With the assistance of mathematical financial models (the process of whose “production” comprises another link in the chain, which we propose to leave out of the analysis) it packages them as loans of the same kind from the viewpoint of the credit risk, of delays in payment, of inability to repay and other attendant features, and it issues new securities grouped into different categories in terms of profitability and credit risk (an incomplete description of collaterized debt obligations – CDOs). For someone, e.g. an insurance fund, to be able to purchase securities, she must have a guarantee of the financial “quality” of the securities. What is thus required is independent evaluation of the securities. Τo what extent they can be profitable, that is to say can represent risk-free investments with a “suitable” return, is certified by credit rating agencies (CRA). Certification is important for managers of various entities that are obliged by company regulations only to make risk-free investments (insurance funds, mutual funds) but also for the managers of all companies and other organizations insofar as evaluation of security affects the credit risk they undertake and so the amount of capital they are required to tie up to offset risk in relation to their anticipated profit. Moreover these credit rating agencies are also involved in the process of issuing securities as advisors on the securitization process on account of the specialized knowledge and the expertise they possess in evaluating credit risk and the “sound” costing of securities.

The next link in this process is the actor who is to purchase the various categories of security. Banks, for the most part, hedge funds, insurance funds. A common practice also is for the category of securities with the highest profitability – that is to say the one that incorporates the greatest risk of suspension of the cash flow and that will be the first to lose from increasing delay in payment of installments by the borrower – to be retained by the issuing bank. It is still, however, not the final link and the ultimate recipient. There are at least two more links that need to be taken into account. Firstly, every person or institution who purchases a security is entitled to take out insurance, so insurance companies are added as a link in the chain, either in the traditional manner or via the CDS (credit default swap) market.(6) Secondly, either the final holder of the security or the SPV is entitled to use the securities as collateral so as to finance her activity in the money market. That is to say, using as collateral securities she has in her possession she is able to take out short-term loans (which she is naturally able to recycle by securing yet other short-term loans). This market is an international market par excellence that has developed within the neoliberal model as an alternative to short-term borrowing from banks.

The relationship between banks, SPVs and the money market is the key point around which confidence in the banking system began to collapse. Specifically, when the first signs appeared that securities on housing loans could be facing unpredicted losses, the credit risk for various categories of the relevant securities began to rise. This generated a need for a restriction in the expansion of, and a change in the composition of, the portfolios being held by a number of different finance organizations. The SPV companies, that were dependent for their financing on the ABCP (asset-backed commercial paper) market (that is to say a money market in which short-term loans are issued on the basis of securities), were not able to find disposable resources. This situation was further aggravated by the downgrading of the credit rating agencies examining the creditworthiness of CDO (collateralized debt obligation) securities, which supported the financing of SPVs. The securities in their possession were not easy to sell and in conditions of unpredicted losses any attempt to sell them would reduce their estimated value, thus multiplying the problems for all the financial organizations holding such securities. As result, this inability to secure finance led many SPVs to seek funding through credit lines they had to the “mother” banks as well as to the utilization of other guarantees that had been agreed upon. All of this happened at a time when the international banks were themselves confronted with a need for larger amounts of capital and limitation of risk. At the same time it was through these actions that there was exposure of a – for the most part unknown – network of informal agreements between the big banks and “affiliated” SPV companies. Insofar as the other players in the financial and credit system did not know what agreements were current between each bank and the SPV companies, there was a more general suspension of confidence, given indeed that the securities being managed by the SPV companies usually involved many times the amount of capital in the “mother” banks.

This situation has led to an increase in interest rates on interbank loans, an increase in demands for collateral, collapse of the CDO securities market and a serious deterioration in the credibility other securities on housing debt, contraction of the possibility of financing through the ABCP market, an increase in risk insurance for all categories of debt and extensive liquidity problems for the big banks – the hub of the international finance system. It has also led many SPV companies to the verge of bankruptcy, forcing the mother banks, in the interest of protecting their own credit-rating, to take back the securities being managed by the SPVs and liquidating them.

There is one point to be remembered here. The relationship between SPVs, i.e. banks, and the money markets shows that the banking and the extra-banking modes of financing are not necessarily antagonistic in their relations with each other. It is just that neoliberal financial arrangements, instead of bringing – as promised – lenders and borrowers into direct contact by abolishing the intermediaries (i.e. the banks), created new kinds of intermediaries, with a more complicated, non-transparent (insofar as the relevant information is personal) and fragile relational structure. For example, the old problem of the relationship between long-term lending and short-term depositing, which banks dealt with internally, has now turned up as an externalproblem between different players on the market: Long-term and illiquid placements on the one hand (the SPVs) and extremely powerful incentives for other players to move freely en masse towards whatever, on each occasion, they perceive to be low-risk securities. This is what explains the paradox of having an “excessively bloated” credit system and at the same time minimal liquidity when it is required, given that its functioning is based on securities that are not easily convertible.

The upholding of the liquidity of the system largely by units chasing secure profits which accordingly when they are in doubt reduce the liquidity of the system is not the cause of the crisis but a symptom of the contradictions that activate the neoliberal model. This type of behaviour is a permanent characteristic of the capitalist financing relationship – one must be persuaded that the fiscal plan is worthwhile. Beyond that, the immediate suspension of confidence is employed by the neoliberal regulatory model as a way of disciplining the markets and facilitating profitable business plans and ultimately the composition of the international money markets in which the “cavaliers” of risk-free profit are a constituent element of the model and indeed embody the objective of the model.

4. Interpretations of the crisis

The reasons for the current crisis can be traced to the contradictory requirements that the neoliberal model for regulating the capitalist economy and its expanded reproduction is called upon to serve. This amounts to saying that it is a systemic crisis in the sense that it has been produced by, and has afflicted, the core of the neoliberal model. We can ascertain this by making a critical survey of the other interpretations of the crisis.

There are interpretations of the crisis that situate it at each of, or all of, the points in the chain of securitization described above. Before we examine this in detail let us point out that what predominates is a seeking out of causality as synonymous with responsibility: “It is their fault”. But the attribution of responsibility to subjects or to extraneous factors is likely to hinder comprehension of the crisis as a crisis engendered by the model of economic regulation itself.

4.1 Subprime loans as cause of the crisis

The commonest approach focuses on the issuing of subprime loans. These are loans that are generally made available to borrowers who do not fulfil some formal requirements for taking out a conventional loan.(7)

These are loans made available to the poorer layers of society and to minorities, which therefore from the viewpoint of the credit system (which bears the greatest credit risk) they also require higher interest rates to counterbalance the risk. But they are also made to borrowers from other income strata who are deeply in debt, as well as those who use this form of borrowing for buying and selling houses. Finally, they represent an opportunity for borrowing for the purpose of rescheduling loans. There are other categories of loans with similar characteristics.

It seems tautological, given that the crisis began with securities on subprime loans, to consider that the issuing of this type of loan is responsible for the emergence of the crisis. Even if we assume that this line or reasoning is correct, it cannot explain why such a crisis did not emerge between 1998 and 2001, when once more there was an increase in delays in paying instalments and so similar problems with the securities issued on the basis of them.

The reasoning is nevertheless fallacious. Not because it is not true, but because it obscures the factors that operated in such a way as to nurture the crisis and then trigger it. Why were subprime loans issued? And why were there borrowers who took them out?

The latter question seems to be easier to answer. Firstly, home ownership and the availability of cheap loans to make it possible was a significant factor in the securing consent to the neoliberal programme not only in the USA but also in other developed countries. In the course of development of the conditions for crisis, in 2002 the US president announced the (neo-conservative-oriented) Homeownership Challenge, according to which the possession of one’s own home was at the heart of the American dream. He then took steps to implement the programme, whose aim was to increase the proportion of homeowners, particularly among minorities (Afro-Americans and Hispanics – those categories of the population among whom four years later one could observe the highest levels of inability to pay off loans and the highest levels of home foreclosures), that is to say to groups mostly excluded from the traditional credit system. To carry out this programme, which “could be implemented only by the state”, many organizations responded, offering new types of housing loan so as to increase the options available to borrowers (evidently including the various categories of subprime, which took off spectacularly after 2002). Secondly, through the availability of loans, tax breaks and credit facilities (made possible by the existence of the home as an asset), the significance of the house itself changes: It is converted (also) – even when seen as a “roof over one’s head” – into a basis for bolstering one’s income and as a entry ticket to the facilities provided by the credit system.

Thus, in a context of stagnating real wages and withdrawal of the state from a whole range of social services formerly provided “free of charge”, the potential for increasing one’s disposable income offered by entry into the credit system (particularly if the mortgage each year increases in value with the increase in land prices) is an important element not only of individual strategies but also of relief from the pressures being exerted by the system. There are other points that could be cited (for example the fact that, depending on the location of the house, one might have access to “more reputable” schools than those in the area of one’s current residence), what has been said is nevertheless enough to show that the development of the subprime market was set in motion by profounder elements in the neoliberal model and that today’s crisis marks the limits of incorporation of social needs through the neo-liberal model. In other words the management of aggregate demand via borrowing and expansion of credit as a means of counteracting constraints on wages is not an effective management mechanism.

As for the first part of the hypothesis, that the issuing of subprimes is simply part of the speculative activity of the bankers who issued them, it is worth stressing that to understand the deeper significance of financial crises it is not useful to make very general references to “speculation” in the sphere of finance. All business activity is “speculative”. Every investment of capital aims at securing the highest possible level of profit. The choice of one or the other sphere of economic activity is simply the means for achieving the goal. Capital is continually migrating from one sector of business activity to another. It increases or reduces its involvement in the financial sphere. It chooses between production of one commodity or another, its only criterion being to serve the objective of higher profit. References to speculation or profiteering thus offer little to aid comprehension of the specific mechanisms out of which each concrete financial crisis emerges.

Speculation as the reason for the issuing of the subprimes is linked to another more highly elaborated explanation for the appearance of the crisis: the originate and distribute (O&D) model for the functioning of banks that has become predominant as banking practice, enabling banks to acquire sections of the market and profitability after the consolidation of the neoliberal model. This is another way of saying the securitization process.

4.2 The securitization process or the O&D model as cause of the crisis

The issuing of subprimes is a product of the capacity for securitization possessed by the banks that issued them. Given that they simply originated the loan and distributed the risk by selling the securities to others while retaining a commission for that service (O&D: an operational model for banks), they did not have sufficient incentive to examine the quality of the credit underlying the loan they had issued, as they would have had if they had kept the loan on their own balance sheet without being able to transfer it. Because their profitability depended on the volume of securities they issued, they indeed had every incentive to extend credit without too closely examining the risks.

First of all, not all subprime loans are securitized. Securitization covered 28% in 1995 but this figure from 1998 onwards began to fall, only recovering from 2001 onward. In 2001 50% of the value of the subprime loans issued were securitized. This percentage gradually rose to 60% in 2003 and between 75% and 80% from 2004 to 2006. But this is not the important figure when attempting to assess the validity of the above argument.

The relaxation of the regulations and conditions for the issuing of credit, with easy acceptance of guarantees in periods of rapid growth of credit in a context of cyclical economic upturn is a general phenomenon and not something innovatory. In the specific case we are examining, in a context of record low interest rates, low inflation and stable growth in the developed economies, it appears as a natural consequence of the conditions of functioning of credit in a capitalist economy. Note that the relaxing of requirements for issuing of credit, above and beyond questions of incentive, does not involve only the initial issuers of the loans, the banks that securitize the loans, but also involves security holders, as may be seen from the observed general squeeze on the differences between all types of return from interest rates on risk-free securities (a clampdown on credit spreads) to the pursuit of “normal” profitability of capital.

One line of explanation for the credit crisis which considers securitization of loans the cause of the crisis, that is to say the transfer of risk outside the portfolio of the lender, because it provides her with incentives to downgrade the quality of loan issuing, has as its necessary supplement a second cause, which is faulty assessment of the credit risk by the credit rating agencies. Because otherwise one cannot explain why securities were bought which corresponded to low quality loans (unless one evoke the ignorance of “naïve” investors).

Nevertheless, persisting in the logic of “mistakes”, that is to say including the “second cause” one is not enabled to explain how many holders of capital (most of them banks with research departments and immediate access to a plethora of data) internationally made a “mistake” in their purchase of securities. It suffices to take into account the common knowledge that higher yields means higher risk insurance and the fact that a certain exchange of written communications between analysts in the international organizations and the central banks has been in public circulation since 2004 at the latest, which made it clear that the methods of price calculation and credit evaluation of CDO departments are “unsound”, because they do not take into account a variety of factors.

Here we have to do with the intermingling of practices that are always socially over-determined (and it is on such relations that the elaboration of the specific mechanisms is based) such as those of the rating agencies, the lending and securitization mechanisms, etc. No manager of capital can easily say: “I know that the CDOs are high-risk and not easily sold and for that reason I inform you that this year you will be content with 3% profit. Don’t look at others who are earning 9% profit because your money is at risk”. In 2001 he would have received the answer: “introduce suitable differentiation into your portfolio, take security measures or risk insurance and throw in some money and we’ll see”. In 2005 they would have told him he was a fool because others have earned a lot of money by retaining a larger proportion of their portfolio in CDOs. Faced with the demand for guaranteed securities and high profits, in the climate that prevailed after 2001, we can imagine the answer of the bank directors when they find out that they can make money from issuing securities and expanding borrowing, and by falling in with the responses of the remaining parties in the securitization chain.

But the pursuit of (risk-free) profit on a global scale has never been the privilege of a few. It is the outcome of arrangements (abolition of restrictions) imposed by (and making possible the elaboration of) the neoliberal model and also comprising a prerequisite for it. One consequence of neoliberalism is that a borrower who has lost her house because of a sudden increase in installment payments owing to expiry of the period of grace and insufficiency of her income may simultaneously be a participant in the mutual fund that financed the mortgage-based securities and sought the issuance of the subprimes on account of the greater profitability, as well as being holder of a truncated portion of her pension on account of the fall in value of the securities in which her insurance fund was investing. Her life is thus divided up in the same way as the portfolio whose fate is determined by the good and bad moments for the markets.

Before moving on to the composition of the various factors that have nurtured, and then triggered, the crisis we propose to examine one final point, which is also projected as one of the underlying reasons for it.

4.3 The bubble in housing prices and low interest rates

In the United States a sharp rise in house prices is to be observed between 2000 and 2006, with some areas showing a greater rise than others. For example in Los Angeles and Miami a price rise of more than 160% is to be noted in a period of six years, while in Detroit the corresponding figure is 10%. On the basis of this increase in prices, construction activity starts to grow after 2002, leading to a record high level of supply of apartments in 2006 and probably playing an important role in the falling off in the increase in price rises in 2006, which in turn had an effect on the servicing of debt. Because above and beyond the fact that this period saw the expiry of the period of grace on a great proportion of loan contracts or low-repayment-rate subprimes that had been taken out previously, we have at the same time a hike in interest rates with concomitant difficulties in servicing debts, and simultaneous incapacitation of the chain of loans for buying a house, which you could later reschedule on more favourable terms because its value would have risen. Nevertheless the average increase is considerably smaller, in fact many times smaller, than what was observed in other countries. The reasons for the increase in prices are not traceable only to expansion of credit. They should also be sought out in what was said earlier about the importance of owning one’s own home and also in the fact that following the dot.com meltdown the purchase of a house seemed like the next risk-free refuge for investments. Another important factor was of course the record-low interest rates after 2001 and the squeeze on various high-risk premiums.

There is nevertheless a big difference between recognizing the importance of the factor of low interest rates and regarding it as the reason for the increase in house prices. Much moreso when it takes the form of a proposal that the FED should increase interest rates so as to bring a halt to the bubble in the housing market. For a start, after 2004 when the FED increased interest rates, a doubling in the proportion of subprime loans can be observed (from 335 billion in 2003 to 540 billion in 2004 and 60 billion in 2006). In general after 2004 and the gradual increase in interest rates, the categories of loans being made available included non-conventional variable-interest-rate loans, that is to say the loans through the medium of which the crisis made its appearance. Even worse, the monetaristic-leaning proposal claiming for an increase in interest rates large enough to be capable of curbing the rise in house prices (that is to say quite a significant rise), it amounted indeed to a proposal that the economy should be led into a recession in 2001 so as to avoid the recession of 2008.

5. The cavaliers of risk-free profit and lives of precarious subjection

References to a general characteristic (speculation) or to the imperfections of the mechanism of functioning of the financial system (Ο&D, faulty assessment, non-correspondence of interests, information imbalance between the parties to a contract, etc.) sheds little light on the two ends of the chain in the crisis process.The ends of the chain are the most important because they show up the contradictions in the neo-liberal model that have nurtured, and then triggered, the crisis.

The rise in house prices, the issuing of subprimes, securitization, evaluation of securities, the relationship between SPVs and the money markets… none of these are causes. They are forms of appearance and vehicles for unfolding of the elements and relationships that comprise the neoliberal model, that is to say the particular form of organization of capitalist social formations after 1980.

Having in the previous sections described the basic elements and the relationships that make up the core of the neoliberal model for arranging the financial system we will confine ourselves here to drawing certain summary conclusions.

(1) The squeeze on salaries and flexibilization of work relations, that is to say reduction in the bargaining power of workers against capital, are a success story of neoliberalism but at the same time represent one of the conditions for the nurturing and triggering of the crisis. The basic element in the equation is an accumulation of contradictory demands from the financial system. The international order of the “knights of risk-free profit” performs a crucial function for the capitalist mode of production, one that is an inseparable core element of the neoliberal model. But the effects of its action (increasing inequality in income distribution, with reduction in the share accruing to wages, and new types of commodification of human needs) pose problems for management of aggregate demand in the interests of smooth functioning of expanded reproduction and accumulation, as well as problems in organizing consent to the model, insofar as restrictions are placed on the capacity for managing the inequalities that are generated through extension of credit to groups that were previously excluded from it. In other words the conditions for increase in class domination of capital appear simultaneously as conditions undermining that domination.

(2) The process of the money markets’ acquiring “depth”, that is to say the process of incorporation into the “International of Capital” of every possible available sum of money that can be deposited in the various separate spheres of the financial system is also a crucial element for the international dimension of the financial system as well as for mobilizing the entirety of the capitalist mode of production for the purpose of increasing profitability and accumulation. Thus, for example, it is regarded as a condition for the financial sphere acquiring “depth” that insurance systems be privatized or in any case that flexible criteria for management be developed to enable participation in the international financial system. It represents success for the model that it enriches the markets with numerous players and mobilizes every sum of capital that cannot be directly invested in the production process so that it participates in the “club” of demands on future profit. Without the broader non-bank financing there would be no securing of the mobility of capital and the broader funding potentialities. Without this depth, credit could be destabilized by the failure of a single player. At the same time, however, this “depth” means ever great pressures for risk-free profit, for issuing of securities, in other words for intense competition, so that unexplored markets can be subordinated to the world of credit, with consequent downplaying of risk and massive withdrawal from participation and funding when secure profit is jeopardized.

Let it be noted here that competition between capitals in showing high profit levels, competition which is significantly enlarged and accelerated by the international organization of finance, as we have seen, means that banks have to extract profits from exploitation of housing loans and from the securities that they issue. This situation coexists with the withdrawal of the state from provision of housing, which now becomes a profit-making activity. This situation in itself means that under the pressure of producing securities and through competition between companies subprimes will be produced and risks will be downplayed. The conditions emerge, that is to say, for a crisis to be generated.

(3) In parallel with depth goes the international character, a constitutive element of the model and its success, insofar as the economic world in its entirety is transformed into a “profit chart”. The international character together with depth and custodianship of risk management techniques and tools (such as CDS) for ensuring security against risk, ensure greater spread of risk. A little risk for many and so no great risk for any one party and none for the system as a whole. But these same elements, depth and the international character, in combination with the demand for security of profit functioned, when the first doubts appeared in relation to the housing credit securities not as factors for spreading risk but for planetary proliferation of risk. Each individual faces an unknown risk, so let her wait for the storm to blow over so as not to communicate to me also her own risk which is thus the manifestation of a global systemic danger. It is finally worth noting that the “wisdom of the markets”, an important element in constructing the core of the neoliberal model, prescribes market evaluation of property (market-to-market value). It is this that has caused the lack of trust between the players because the fall in value of the securities has spoilt the balance-sheets of the institutions maintaining them and protracted the uncertainty. The solution adopted is a familiar one. But the result is that it has become possible for a number of elements not to be factored into the overall assessment.

(4) Before proceeding with characterization of the crisis we should note one important point. All these elements of previous crises over the last two decades have functioned through different combinations of factors and to differing extents. Nevertheless, because they did not strike at the heart of the model, it was possible for those seeking to implement it to resort to a dismissive device: the basic idea is sound. It is just a question of applying its principles with greater consistency or at any rate taking measures that don’t involve allowing the emerging problems to draw into question the central conception. Today this is no longer possible. The heart of the system has taken a hit and the metaphysical/ideological concessions that continue to legitimate it are treated as such by broader circles.

6. On characterization of the crisis:
From financial crisis to crisis of overaccumulation

The above arguments make it possible for us to characterize the crisis. It is a crisis that has appeared in the financial sphere and is systemic. Systemic in the sense that it has been engendered by the elements and the relations that are at the core of the neoliberal model. It is systemic also because it has struck at important nodal points of the system and through them at the terms of operation of the “International of Capital”. It is systemic also because it has hit the most powerful organizational centre of the model. The markets and the financial institutions of the United States, which were the key control points for the overall system of organizing markets, intervening in them and promoting financial innovations and financial tools. If we take it into account that Britain, the world’s second financial centre, has also been affected (and very powerfully), we obtain some picture of how the system has been centrally affected. It is also systemic in that the capacity of the collective capitalist to guarantee the functioning of this arrangement has been incapacitated.

It is not necessary to start again from the beginning, that is to say from housing policy and its financing in the USA. If, at the moment that the crisis has affected an important nodal point of the system measures were taken that approached the problem as a crisis of capital and not just of liquidity, that is to say, in other words, if there had been the Brown plan before the Paulson plan had been formulated (making the latter superfluous) it is quite probable that this crisis would not have assumed the dimensions that it has. There would unavoidably have been a credit squeeze, but quite likely not to the extent, and at the speed, that we have now seen. Ιn other words the implementation in the collective capitalist’s organization and policies of management of the neoliberal model (e.g. Paulson’s policies of defending “self-correction by the markets”) up to the “very last minute”, played a role in accelerating and spreading the crisis.

The danger of systemic collapse of the credit system has been minimized by comparison with the situation of several months ago (the days after the collapse of Lehman, in September 2008). Nevertheless, this does not mean that there will not be significant damage to other banks, insurance companies or other private capitals even outside the sphere of the financial system. That is to say, the crisis is still unfolding but it is now taking on the characteristics of a crisis of overaccumulation, which, starting from a ruthless squeeze on the financial sector also drags in other sectors and introduces the economic system as a whole to the operations of liquidation of inadequately utilized capital (obviously at an unequal rate in the different countries and with an intermeshing of the developments in each country both with the developments in other countries and with the financial system).

The interconnectedness of events is thus the reverse of what is often maintained (e.g. Brenner 2008). What is involved is not a continuing crisis of overaccumulation dating from the 1970s, which has fed superfluous capital into the sphere of finance, in this way leading to speculation, the “bubble” and the crisis. The preceding crisis of overaccumulation of capital had already been blunted with the contribution of the neoliberal settlement (in which a decisive nodal point was the functioning of the financial sphere). There had been a return of profits to levels approaching those of the early seventies, production had been restructured, labour made more flexible, wage levels frozen. The share accruing to wages was continually contracting. But the blocking of the sphere of finance and credit funding on which expanded reproduction of capital was based was necessarily translated as “involvement” of this expanded reproduction. It was initially expressed in overproduction of (unsold) goods, given that a credit squeeze implies restrictions on productive and individual consumption (perpetuated by credit). This in turn meant an abrupt fall in profitability and the necessity for cutbacks in production, that is to say lagging dynamism in the means of production, overaccumulation of productive capital, necessity for a new cycle of restructuring.

Τhe latest decision framework, variations on the Brown proposal, for participation of the state in capital or nationalization of banks and other enterprises, is not an answer for the elements that nurtured and triggered the crisis. There has accordingly been a mobilization of the international bureaucracy via various institutions suitably inoculated against the “virus” of democracy, and it is now promising to discuss the crisis and take measures to prevent its recurrence.

This is only to be expected. A crisis at the heart of the system puts on the agenda the question of rearrangement and naturally “registration” of the international correlations of power. Systemic crisis does not necessarily spell destruction for the system. It means exposure of its contradictions. And the representatives of the collective capitalist perceive the situation more or less as follows (on the basis of the current dynamic of unfolding and proliferation of the crisis): that it is a disease that is not going to pass just with a pill but will require some kind of an operation that will enable the same organism to continue to function, albeit in a different way, for example without excessive speeding-up. But each attempt at regulation means a redistribution of power and most probably cancellation of functions. However from the new arrangements that are anticipated there will be no interference with the international character of the finance system, securitization, the deepening of the market, the squeeze on working people. These are inviolable terms of each new set of arrangements, on the basis of today’s strategy of capital. They are strategic options with no fall-back position. Thus, as perceived by a plethora of organizations and shapers of policy, state intervention must be chronologically limited, must aim exclusively at the generally recognized problem and must leave no trace behind it when the time comes for it to withdraw (particularly traces that would hinder the “free” functioning of markets).

If, then, the core of the neoliberal dogma must remain intact, with mere readjustment of the relations and the pace of the functioning of its constituent elements or the regional machinery (with the overwhelming correlation of power in favour of capital simply taken as a given), the workforce will continue to be treated as the dependent variable, destined to absorb all the shocks, current and future.

Nevertheless, crisis at the heart of the system also entails breaches in the terms of its ideological hegemony. Citizens understand quite simply: if the state intervenes to save the banks why can it not do the same for the insurance funds, for the health system, for…

The traces left behind by the current conjuncture of the crisis do not however require any particular skill to detect. Firstly, discredit is brought to bear on a basic ideology that the state is “bad because it is incompetent” and the markets “good because they are both competent and effective”. States are being called upon to act as guarantors of stability, in other words to implement interventionist policies. This is not something easily to be erased from the collective memory. Secondly, the crisis is having adverse effects on the capacity for generating consensus because of the effects it is having on the working population and “underdogs” generally. The limitations of demand management, not through strengthening of wages and the terms of employment but through encouraging excessive household indebtedness, have become evident to all. Both these phenomena strengthen the political forces that seek a different way of managing the capitalist system. From this viewpoint it should not pass unnoticed that P. Krugman (Nobel Prize 2008) in his book, The Conscience of a Liberal is in effect calling for state intervention for the creation of trade unions in branches where there is an uninsured workforce, defending the idea of a public and universal health system, demands which make manifest the tension that has been accumulated on account of the polarization imposed by the class struggle. Thirdly there is a readjustment in the international correlation of power. A reform of the international financial system always harbours an inherent potential that there will be a rewriting of international rules and obligations, thus affording an opportunity for recording the correlations of power that have emerged.

The labour movements cannot comprise part of this new regulation, which is directed against their interests. On the other hand, the crisis for the first time in decades gives them the opportunity to intervene so as to change the correlations of power and impose solutions that secure their own interests in the face of those of capital. Τhe point today is that social insurance is dependent on the profitability of the insurance funds, education on the privately funded “research programmes” and on student loans, work on the international evaluation of the profitability of the enterprise on the world’s stock exchanges and financial markets, food on the smooth functioning of the futures markets, the operations of the municipalities on mutual funds and international securities markets, the environment on pollution rights, the covering of basic social needs on the level of credit card debt.

In present-day conditions the project of de-commodifying needs, that is to say the defense of social organization on the basis of freedom in satisfaction of needs and not the repressive calculus of valorization of capital… is urgent.
Spyros Lapatsioras, Department of Economics, University of Crete (email: spirosla@gmail.com); Leonidas Maroudas, Business School, University of the Aegean (email: lmarouda@aegean.gr); Panayotis G. Michaelides, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Technical University of Athens, (email:pmichael@central.ntua.gr); John Milios, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Technical University of Athens, (email: john.milios@gmail.com); D.P. Sotiropoulos, Department of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, University of the Aegean, (email: d.p.sotiropoulos@gmail.com).

Notes

(1) In Volume I of Capital, it is written: “The monetary crisis defined in the text as a particular phase of every general industrial and commercial crisis, must be clearly distinguished from the special sort of crisis, also called a monetary crisis, which may appear independently of the rest and only affects industry and commerce by its backwash. The pivot of these crises is to be found in money capital, and their immediate sphere of impact is therefore banking, the stock exchange and finance” (Marx 1990: 236).

(2) For an interesting analysis of the role of modern financial derivatives, see Bryan and Rafferty (2006).

(3) For a Marxian interpretation of the overaccumulation crisis, see Milios et al. (2002).

(4) According to Marx, “Overproduction of capital and not of individual commodities – though this overproduction of capital always involves overproduction of commodities – is nothing more than overaccumulation of capital” (Marx 1991: 359). “Periodically too much is produced in the way of means of labour and means of subsistence, too much to function as means for exploiting the workers at a given rate of profit” (Marx 1991: 367).

(5) Here we include for purposes of simplicity all the forms of SPV: SIV (structured investment vehicle) and above all banking hedge funds.

(6) That is to say the market for contracts by means of which the first party pays the second an insurance premium and the second undertakes to cover losses arising from some more or less formalized events that might have an effect on cash flow or the value of a security in the possession of the first party (for example cessation of servicing of the security’s cash flow on the part of the issuer of the security, or premature paying-off of the debt which has the effect of reducing the overall cash flow), in both cases events that have become increasingly prevalent in recent years.

(7) One example of such disqualifiers is a bad credit rating, that is to say delays of more than 90 days in paying instalments. Other examples include having an income insufficient to justify the taking out of a loan of such high value, or being employed in a job which does not guarantee a regular flow of payments, or lacking suitable documents that could justify the size of the loan in relation to the client’s declared income, etc.
Selected Bibliography

Agarwal, Sumit, 2007. “Comparing the prime and subprime mortgage markets”. Essays on issues, FRB of Chicago , August 2007, No. 241.

Amato Jeffery D and Craig H Furfine 2003. “Are credit ratings procyclical?”, BIS Monetary and Economic Department, Working Papers, No 129.

Arestis, Philip and Malcolm Sawyer. 2006. A Handbook of Alternative Monetary Economics, Edward Elgar Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA.

Ashcraft Adam B. and Til Schuermann, 2008. “Understanding the Securitization of Subprime Mortgage Credit”, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Staff Report no. 318, March 2008

Berger Allen N., Anil K. Kashyap, Joseph M. Scalise, Mark Gertler and Benjamin M. Friedman. 1995. “The Transformation of the U.S. Banking Industry: What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 1995, No. 2, (1995), pp. 55-218.

Bliss, Robert R. and George G. Kaufman, 2002. “Bank Procyclicality, Credit Crunches, and Asymmetric Monetary Policy Effects: a Unifying Model”, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Working Papers WP-2002-18.

Borio, Claudio, 2008, “The financial turmoil of 2007-?: a preliminary assessment and some policy considerations”, BIS, Monetary and Economic Department, Working Papers No 251.

Borio, C, Furfine, C. and P.Lowe, 2001. “Procyclicality of the financial system and financial stability: issues and policy options”, BIS Papers no. 1, March.

Brenner, R. 2008, “Devastating Crisis Unfolds”, IV Online magazine: IV396 – January,http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1417

Bryan, D. and Rafferty, M. 2006, Capitalism with Derivatives. A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Catarineu-Rabell, Eva, Patricia Jackson and Dimitrios P Tsomocos, 2003. “Procyclicality and the new Basel Accord – banks’ choice of loan rating system”, Bank of England 2003, Working Paper no. 181.

Duménil Gerard and Dominique Lévy, 2005a. “The nature and contradictions of neoliberalism”.

Duménil Gerard and Dominique Lévy, 2005b.  “Costs and benefits of neoliberalism. a class analysis”.

Dymski Gary A., 2007. “From Financial Exploitation to Global Banking Instability: Two Overlooked Roots of the Subprime Crisis”, SOAS Conference, “A Crisis of Financialisation?”, 2008.05.30.

Feldstein, Martin S., 2007. “Housing, Credit Markets and the Business Cycle”, NBER Working Paper 13471.

Fender, Ingo and John Kiff, 2004. “CDO rating methodology: Some thoughts on model risk and its implications”, BIS Working Papers, No 163.

Goodhart, Charles .A.E., 2008. “The background to the 2007 financial crisis”. International Economics and Economic Policy vol. 4, no.4 pp.33-346.

Greenlaw, David, Jan Hatzius, Anil K Kashyap and Hyun Song Shin, 2008. “Leveraged Losses: Lessons from the Mortgage Market Meltdown”, US Monetary Policy Forum Conference, New York, 29 February 2008.

Greenspan, Alan and James Kennedy 2007. “Sources and Uses of Equity Extracted from Homes”. Federal Reserve Board, Finance and Economics Discussion Series, Staff working papers, 2007-20.

Greenspan, Alan, 2002. Cyclicality and Banking Regulation.  Conference on Bank Structure and Competition, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Jobst, Norbert and Arnaud de Servigny, 2007. Τhe Handbook of Structured Finance. McGraw-Hill, New York (chapter 12, 13).

Kregel, Jan, 2007. “The Natural Instability of Financial Markets”, The Levy Economics Institute, Working Paper No. 523.

Kregel, Jan, 2008a. “Minsky’s Cushions of Safety. Systemic Risk and the Crisis in the U.S. Subprime Mortgage Market”, The Levy Economics Institute, Public Policy Brief, No.93.

Kregel, Jan, 2008b. “Changes in the U.S. Financial System and the Subprime Crisis”, The Levy Economics Institute, Working Paper No. 530.

Krugman, Paul. 2007. The Conscience of a Liberal. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Kuttner, Robert. 2007. “The Alarming Parallels between 1929 and 2007”. The American Prospect, October 2.

Marx, K. 1990. Capital, Volume one, Penguin Classics, London

Marx, K. 1991. Capital, Volume three, Penguin Classics, London.

Marx-Internet 1872. Capital, Volume 1.

Marx-Internet 1894. Capital, Volume III.

MEW (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels – Werke), Band 23. 1968. Das Kapital, Bd. I, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

MEW (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels – Werke), Band 25. 1983. Das Kapital, Bd. III, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Milios, J., Dimoulis D. and Economakis, G. 2002. Karl Marx and the Classics. An Essay on Value, Crises and the Capitalist Mode of Production. Aldershot, London: Ashgate.

Palley, Thomas I. ,2007, “Financialization: What It Is and Why It Matters”, The Levy Economics Institute, Working Paper No. 525.

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Wray, Randall L. 2008. “Financial Markets Meltdown. What Can We Learn from Minsky?”,The Levy Economics Institute, Public Policy Brief No. 94.

Werner Bonefeld

I     ‘All emancipation is the restoration of the human world and of human relationships to Man himself’ (Marx). 

‘Class’ is not an affirmative category but a critical concept. The critique of class society finds the positive only in the classless society, in communism. Communism means ‘communis’ – the commune or association of the direct producers, where each contributes according to her abilities, and where each receives according to her needs. This, then, is the society of the free and equal – a commune of communist individuals who exercise their own social power directly.(1) Instead of counter-posing ‘society’ as an abstraction to the individual, the communist individuals recognise and organise ‘society’ as their own social product.

Class analysis is therefore not a flag-waving exercise on behalf of the working class. Indeed, ‘to be a productive labourer is…not a piece of luck, but a misfortune’.(2) Affirmative conceptions of class, however well-meaning and benevolent in their intensions, presuppose the working class as productive force that deserves a better, a new deal. What is a fair wage? Marx made the point that ‘”price of labour” is just as irrational as a yellow logarithm’.(3) The demand for fair wages and fair labour conditions abstracts from the very conditions of ‘fairness’ in capitalism. Marx’s insight according to which ‘a great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children’, remains a powerful judgement on contemporary conditions of capitalistically constituted fair and equal exchange relations.(4)

Theory on behalf of the working class leads to the acceptance of programs and tickets whose common basis is the everyday religion of bourgeois society: commodity fetishism. Chapter 48 of Volume Three of Capitalprovides Marx’s critique of the theory of class proposed by classical political economy (and shared by modern social science), according to which class interests are determined by the revenue sources (or, in Weberian terms, market situation) of social groups, rather than being founded in the social relations of production as Marx argues.(5) Political Economy is indeed a scholarly dispute how the booty pumped out of the labourer may be divided (6) – and clearly, the more the labourer gets, the better. After all, it is her social labour that produces the ‘wealth of nations’. Even on the assumption that when hiring labour, equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, ‘the transaction is all that only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of’.(7) The critique of political economy is not satisfied with perpetuating the labourer. Its reasoning is subversive of all relations of human indignity. Subversion is not the business of alternative elites that seek revolution as a mere conformist rebellion – a revolution for the perpetuation of wage slavery. Their business is to lead labour, not its self-emancipation. Subversion aims at general human emancipation.

The second and third Internationals subscribed to naturalised conceptions of society and history. Their equally ‘naturalised Marxism’ argued that capitalist economic categories have a trans-historical validity, that distinct modes of production are distinguished by the way in which these categories manifest themselves in historically concrete societies, and that history contained a objective developmental logic, which in critical expansion of Smith’s stages theory of history, moves relentlessly through the ages until transition to socialism becomes an ‘objective possibility’. The revisionists did so to argue that revolution was unnecessary, and the orthodoxy that revolution was a product of natural necessity.(8) I am not at all certain that history contains this teleology and note that erstwhile proponents of this view, see for example Wolfgang-Fritz Haug, now think so too, declaring that such belief in the objective necessity of state socialist transformation has revealed itself as a ‘child’s dream’.(9) If, however, history is not the consequence of either divine revelation or abstract historical laws, what is it?

History does not make history. That is to say, ‘[h]istory does nothing, does not “possess vast wealth”, does not “fight battles”! It is Man, rather, the real, living Man who does all that, who does possess and fight, it is not “history” that uses Man [Mensch] as a means to pursue its ends, as if it were a person apart. History is nothing but the activity of Man pursuing its ends’.(10) Historical materialism is not the dogma indicated by clever opponents and unthinking proponents alike, but a critique of things understood as dogmatic. That is to say, the ‘human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape’, but not conversely, the anatomy of the ape does not explain the anatomy of Man.(11) If the anatomy of the ape would really explain the anatomy of Man than the ape would already possess Man as the innate necessity of its evolution – a natural teleology or an already written future. The future, however, has not already been written. Nor will it be the result of some abstractly supposed objective logic of historical development. History does not unfold, as if it were a person apart. History has to be made, and will be made, by Man pursuing her ends. The future that will come will not result from some objective laws of historical development but will result from the struggles of today. The orthodox argument about the objective laws of historical development does not reveal abstract historical laws. It reveals accommodation to ‘objective conditions’, and derives socialism from capitalism, not as an alternative but as its supposedly more effective competitor.

There is no universal historical law that leads human kind from some imagined historical beginning via capitalism to socialism. Neither is history on the side of the working class. History takes no sides: it can as easily be the history of barbarism as of socialism – yet, against the background of three decades of sustained attack on the working class, and in the face terror, war, global financial meltdown and  – the threat of – global depression, barbarism seems the more likely alternative, and it seems more likely today than only yesterday. Yet, the fact that monetary accumulation (M…M’) is dissociated from productive accumulation (M…P…M’) is testimony to the radicality of the challenge to capitalist power, and of the fear that follows from it that every upturn in the economy would reactivate conflict.(12) Over the last 25 years, capitalism created its own virtual reality, accumulating fictitious wealth, mortgaging the future exploitation of labour. This mortgage has now broken down. The pace of crisis-ridden change in the world has accelerated to such a degree that a considered judgement on the future is quite impossible. Nevertheless, and especially in the misery of our time, it is worth to recall Marx’s insight that ‘all social life is essentially practical’. Just imagine, I say that contemporary conditions make revolution impossible, and then it breaks out, say, in Paderborn or Mainz of all places!

Man has to eat. This is a natural necessity, from which derives neither capitalism nor socialism. To say that capitalist economic categories are categories of natural necessity, entails not only the naturalization of essentially social categories and therewith also the ontologization of capitalist economic categories as self-active things, that, posited by nature, appear to develop according to their own innate logic, as developed nature. Such naturalisation of social categories also entails the derivation of class struggle from assumed structural properties. This, then, is the argument that objective laws of development structure the behaviour and actions of social classes and set the general framework within which class struggle unfolds. Joachim Hirsch has formulated this point succinctly when he argued that ‘within the framework of its general laws, capitalist development is determined … by the actions of the acting subjects and classes, the resulting concrete conditions of crisis and their political consequences’.(13) That is to say, the laws of social existence impose themselves ‘objectively’ on the backs of the protagonists.(14) It is true that in capitalism, the constitution of the world occurs behind the backs of the individuals, yet – critically – it is their work. This approach, then, represses the whole issue of social-historical constitution. Instead, it elevates the ‘laws’ of second nature, the existence of which depended on the continued existence of specific social relations, into general historical laws.(15)

Louis Althusser, who needs to be credited with transforming Soviet Marxism into an academically viable branch of Western Marxism, could therefore argue that the critique of political economy is not a critique of capitalism but that it rather ‘develops the conceptual system’ of scientific Marxism.(16) According to Althusser and his school, it shows the capitalist anatomy of trans-historical laws of economic necessity but does not analyse capitalism as a living process. Deciphering the natural basis of the capitalist mode of production requires therefore microscopic attention, abstracting the enduring structures of economic necessity from their over-determined mode of historical appearance, of their capitalist substantiation. Struggle for socialism would thus require not only a revolutionary vanguard in the form of the party, but also a scientific vanguard that, independent from tactical and strategic struggles, provides socialism with scientific insight into economic nature, including the technical knowledge that the regulation of a socialist economy of labour requires. The orthodox endeavour to trace capitalist social categories to their trans-historical natural basis says more than it cares to admit. On closer inspection its endeavour seems in every respect tied to capitalist realities, including its conception of progress. By naturalising capitalist categories, it elevates them into laws of history in general. It thus represents history as a history of capitalism’s becoming, and conceives of socialism as a derivative of capitalism.(17) That is to say, and drawing on Marx’s critique of the ‘economists” naturalisation of economic categories, it presents the capitalist mode of production as ‘encased in eternal natural laws independent of history’. It is this presentation that allows them, the economists and scientific socialists, to smuggle capitalist relations in as the ‘inviolable natural laws on which society and history in the abstract are founded’.(18) There is no such thing as abstract history. History does not make history.

In distinction to the second and third Internationals and its benevolent academicians and resourceful technocrats, capitalist economic categories do not have a trans-historical validity. They belong to the society from which they spring. Capitalist laws of social reproduction are finite, transient products of the finite and transient reality of capitalism. Whether the struggle for human emancipation goes beyond these categories is a matter of communist social practice. Nature, or the so-called objective laws of historical development, has nothing to do with it. That is to say, the future has not already been written, social structures are valid only for and within human social relations, capitalist economic categories manifest the laws of necessity in capitalistically constituted forms of social relations, which ‘Men have entered into’ historically (19), and history does not impose itself objectively on the acting subjects, as if it were a person apart. History does not happen by itself. Whatever history there will be, it will have been made by the acting subjects themselves. The future is made in the present, it is as much a present-future as a future-present.

The working class struggles not because of Marx’s critique of political economy, but because it is an exploited and dominated class. It struggled against capitalism before Marx put pen to paper, and struggles against capitalism until this day not because but despite of Marx. One could argue, as indeed Johannes Agnoli has, that it is ‘Man, who, as a single individual, as a group, or as a mass, understands himself as subject and who defends himself against a merely objective existence – in politics, in religion, in philosophy. One can say that subversion is a truly human phenomenon. Man objects to be a mere football of the almighty. Here he is mere object. Similarly, as a servant of the master he is mere object, regardless of whether we conceive this in social or religious terms. Man is never at the centre of politics (as the political parties say), but he is a means of politics…And an object he remains most of all when he is kept in a state of ignorance…Subversion operates against systems of thought, against political and economic systems, that threaten nature and therewith always also Man’.(20) Subversion is able to negate the established order because it is ‘man’ made.

Marx’s relevance to contemporary class struggle is simply this: his critique of political economy reveals the genesis of existing social relations in human practice – this at least is its critical intension -, and his argument shows that existing relations of misery develop by force of their negation: in order to posit surplus labour capital has to posit necessary labour. The ‘relation between necessary labour and surplus labour…is… the relation between the constitutive parts of the working day and the class relation which constitutes it’.(21) Capital depends on the imposition of necessary labour, the constituent side of surplus labour, upon the world’s working classes. It has to posit necessary labour at the same time as which it has to reduce necessary labour to the utmost in order to increase surplus value. This reduction develops labour’s productive power. That is, less social labour time is needed to produce an equivalent amount of use-values. Increased labour productivity tends thus to increase material wealth. The circumstance that less and less socially necessary labour time is required to produce, for want of a better expression, the necessities of life, limits the realm of necessity and so allows the blossoming of what Marx characterised as the realm of freedom.(22) Yet, given the capitalist form of wealth, this increase in ‘material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value’.(23) Accumulation for the sake of accumulation thus tends to push the capitalist mode of production beyond the limits of its social form. Containing it within its form requires force (Gewalt), including not only the destruction of productive capacities, unemployment, but also the destruction of human life through war and ecological disaster. Every social progress turns into a calamity. In capitalism, every increase in labour productivity shortens the hours of labour but in its capitalist form, it lengthens them. The introduction of sophisticated machinery lightens labour but in its capitalist form, it heightens the intensity of labour. Every increase in the productivity of labour increases the material wealth of the producers but in its capitalist form makes them paupers. Most importantly of all, greater labour productivity sets labour free, makes labour redundant. But rather then shortening the hours of work and thus absorbing all labour into production on the basis of a shorter working day, freeing life-time from the ‘realm of necessity’, those in employment are exploited more intensively, while those made redundant find themselves on the scrap heap of a mode of production that sacrifices ‘“human machines” on the pyramids of accumulation’ (24).

The class struggle over the capitalist attempt at reducing the workers’ life-time (Lebenszeit) to work-time, takes place in the hidden abode of production, behind the factory gate on which is written ‘no entry except on business’. Is this a struggle between mere agents or bearers (Träger) of objective economic laws and structures? Unsurprisingly, the bourgeoisie endorses this notion of the working class, and demands that it behaves well as a bearer of economic resourcefulness, that is, as a compliant, effective, efficient and resourceful factor of production. It also tells the working class to tie its interests to the expanded accumulation of capital so that it obtains its just reward by means of the so-called trickle down effect. However, for itself, the bourgeoisie rejects such notions. Instead it demands respect and celebration of its purposefulness and overall humanity. The saying that Man is by nature lazy tells us nothing about human nature. However, it tells us a lot about bourgeois society. There is no doubting the fact that quite a few of those who have never worked have historically been wined and dined rather well. The supposition that the working class lacks humanity because in reality it is just a productive agent reveals therefore a certain class standpoint.(25)

The orthodox tradition of Western Marxism belittles the idea that society has to do with Menschen in their social relations of production. Louis Althusser argued that one can recognize Man only on the condition that the philosophical myth of Man is reduced to ash. Nicos Poulantzas radicalized this view when he argued that Marx’s theory amounts to a radical break from the ‘historical problematic of the subject’.(26) Althusser was however right to argue that Man does not exist. In the topsy turvey world of capital, Man exists indeed as a personification of economic categories. However, does it therefore follow that the critique of political economy is really no more than a secularised mythology of the ‘logic of things’? Does it really make sense to say that workers personify variable capital? Variable does not go on strike. Workers do. Wherever capital goes, capitalist class conflict occurs, and wherever class conflict occurs, capital seeks flight, though not always successfully.(27)

The emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself. But how? The simple idea of human emancipation is difficult to conceive in practice. According to Georg Lukács the worker can resist reification because, as long as he rebels against it consciously, ‘his humanity and his soul are not changed into commodities’ (Lukács, 1970, p. 172). Lukács derives the revolutionary subject, he calls it the totality of the proletarian subject represented by the party, from the humanity and soul of the worker – the party is the soul and presents the humanity of the otherwise reified worker. Ernst Bloch (2000) talks about the ‘inner transcendence of matter’; Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993) about ‘materialist instinct’, and Antonio Negri (and his co-author Michael Hardt) about the bio-power of the multitude.(28) These differentiations of society into system and soul/transcendent matter/materialist instinct/bio-power separate what belongs together. Indeed, whichever formulation is favoured, they all insist on a subject that is conceived in contradistinction to society – all seem to favour a subject that possesses either a theological (soul), material or biological residue that as the (invisible) essence of resistance has not been fully absorbed by capitalism.

The theologized or biologized subject is not a social subject. It is an asserted subject. It is meant to do what the antagonistic society is no longer assumed to be able to do, that is, to realize the social subject in battle against its own perverted mode of existence. Really? It is quite possible that the history as we know it has come to an end. ‘Of one thing we can be certain. The ideologies of the twentieth century will disappear completely. This has been a lousy century. It has been filled with dogmas, dogmas that one after another have cost us time, suffering, and much injustice’.(29) For every history that comes to an end another history comes to the fore. The 20th Century was also a century of hope in the alternative entelechy of solidarity and human emancipation – from Mexico (1914) to Petrograde (1917) and Kronstadt (1921), Berlin (1918), Budapest (1919) and Barcelona (1936) to Berlin (1953) and Budapest (1956), from Paris (1968), Gdansk (1980) Chiapas (1994) to the Argentinean piqueteros (2001).(30) These, and many more, have been the intense moments of the struggle for human social autonomy, constituting points of departure towards the society of the free and equal.

The difficulty of conceiving of the self-emancipation of the working class has to do with the very idea of human emancipation. In distinction to the pursuit of profit, seizure of the state, pursuit and preservation of political power, and economic value and human resource, it follows a completely different entelechy of human development. Quite reasonably, the labour movement strives for the so-called emancipation of labour and concerns itself – commendably – with the improvement of the quality of life for workers. There is however more to this concern than it appears on first sight.

There is thus need for a realistic conception of the struggle for human emancipation. Class struggle has to be rediscovered as the laboratory of communism – this movement of the working class in and against capitalism. This struggle does not follow some abstract idea. Nor does it target capitalist society from some sort of external vantage point. Class struggle is a struggle in and against capitalism. Its dynamic tends to push beyond institutionalised forms of class incorporation and regulation. Whether it does can neither be predicted nor organised from above. That is to say, class-consciousness cannot be brought to the workers from without – the communist party does not commandeer the unconscious. It is partial to the class struggle. In this, the communists ‘express the actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, form a historical movement going on under our very eyes’.(31) The idea that workers lack class-consciousness entails not only the notion of the Party as the vanguard bearer of that consciousness. It entails also the accusation that workers lack understanding of what is best for them, and that they therefore need to be led. This justification of the form of the party rests on the so-called objective character of conditions. According to this view, the working class is the revolutionary class because of its objective position in the production process. It is by virtue of its ‘objective’ position that the working class is the revolutionary class. Objective does not mean subjective. That is, objectively, the working class exists in-itself and, in order to realize its potential as a revolutionary class, it has to be transformed into a class for-itself, into a class subject. This transformation requires ‘leadership’. ‘In-itself’ the working class can only develop economic consciousness, not political consciousness. Class in-itself thus means that its consciousness is tied to capitalist realities, and that in-itself the working class is unable to look beyond capitalism. What however is the working class ‘in-itself’ struggling for?

‘In-itself’ the working class struggles for better wages and conditions, and defends wage levels and conditions. It struggles against capital’s ‘were-wolf’s hunger for surplus labour’ and its destructive conquest for additional atoms of labour time, and thus against its reduction to a mere time’s carcass.(32) It struggles against a life constituting solely of labour-time and thus against a reduction of her human life to a mere economic resource. It struggles for respect, education, and recognition of human significance, and above all it struggles for food, shelter, clothing, warmth, love, affection, knowledge, and dignity. It struggles against the reduction of its life-time to labour-time, of its humanity to an economic resource, of its living existence to personified labour-time. Its struggle as a class ‘in-itself’ really is a struggle ‘for-itself’: for life, human distinction, life-time, and above all, satisfaction of basic human needs. It does all of this in conditions (Zustände) in which the increase in material wealth that it has produced, pushes beyond the limits of the capitalist form of wealth.(33) Every so-called trickle down effect that capitalist accumulation might bring forth presupposes a prior and sustained trickle up in the capitalist accumulation of wealth. And then society ‘suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence; too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does bourgeois society get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.(34) In conclusion, ‘freedom is a hollow delusion for as long as one class of humans can starve another with impunity. Equality is a hollow delusion for as long as the rich exercise the right to decide over the life and death of others’.(35) The existence of the labourer as an economic category does therefore not entail reduction of consciousness to economic consciousness. It entails the concept of economy as an experienced concept, and economic consciousness as an experienced consciousness. At the very least, economic consciousness is an unhappy consciousness.(36) It is this consciousness that demands reconciliation: freedom turns concrete in the changing forms of repression as resistance to repression.

The understanding of class struggle has thus to be brought down, away from the ‘lofty’ sphere of scientistic supposition of ‘objective conditions’ and ‘objective laws of historical development’, and towards ‘the real life-activity’ of the real individuals, their activity and the conditions under which they live.(37) What needs to be attained, then, is a conception of struggle that is in keeping with the insight that for the oppressed ‘the “state of emergency” in which we live, is not the exception but the rule’.(38)  Upon reaching the factory gate with its inscription ‘no entry except on business’, one has to enter to appreciate the daily struggle over the reduction of the worker to personified labour-time, over the appropriation of atoms of additional labour time. This also entails that instead of succumbing to the imaginary of globalisation as some sort of deterritorialised and dematerialised cyber-space, it would make sense to develop a conception of struggle that understands that the ‘everyday struggle over the production and appropriation of surplus value in every individual workplace and every local community…is the basis of the class struggle on a global scale’.(39) The world’s proletariat cannot be taught to be emancipated, nor can it be forced to be free. It has to be free for its liberation so that it is able to become free. Sustained mass demonstrations and social struggles, and therewith the politicisation of social labour relations, are the laboratory of the society of the ‘free and equal’.

Those to whom human emancipation has meaning should not dread to be called idealists. They are. Idealism is the true reality of the spectre of communism. Reason without imagination creates monsters. Imagination without reason creates useless things. Reason wedded with imagination creates the beauty of communist struggle: ‘all emancipation is a return of the human world and human relationships to humans themselves. Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of bourgeois society, an egoistic and independent individual, on the other hand, to a citizen of the state, a moral person. Not until the real individual man has taken the abstract citizen back into himself and, as an individual man, has become a species-being in his empirical life, in his individual work and individual relationships, not until man recognises and organises his “forces propres” as social forces and thus no longer separates social forces from himself in the form of political forces, not until then will human emancipation be completed.'(40) This, then, is the conception of communism as social autonomy where no-thing exists independently from the social individual, where the associated producers are in control of their own social forces. Social autonomy is not some sort of distant future. It is at issue in every struggle over the capitalist reduction to human purposes to some abstract labour, to cash and product. It is the means towards its end. In his introduction to his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Marx formulated the categorical imperative of human emancipation when he argued that all relations have to be abolished in which Man is a degraded, exploited, debased, forsaken and enslaved being’.(41) Communism is the practical movement of this imperative in and against bourgeois society. At times this movement is clearly visible to everybody who wants to see, at other times it is visible only to those who dare to see it.

Human emancipation, communism, is not a condition that needs to be created in some future society. It is the real negation of existing conditions from within these conditions themselves. The communist individual is someone who lives the communist imperative in everyday life, from mundane routines to the most refined expressions. The communist individual is someone who understands the practical meaning of the struggle for a society in which the ‘free development of each is the condition of the free development of all’. The communist individual cannot be derived from hypothasized, objective conditions and structures. The communist individual has no price. The community of communist individuals does not derive from capitalism. It does not compete with capitalism. It struggles against it. Nor is this community a mere idealist hypothesis. Its reality is neither given nor assumed. Its reality is its own reality. Nothing is as it seems. There is no certainty.

Werner Bonefeld specialises in critical political economy and social theory. He teaches at the Department of Politics, University of York (UK). Before coming to York he taught at the Universities of Frankfurt and Edinburgh. He has authored and edited numerous books that have contributed in the development of the Open Marxism school. Recently, he edited Subverting the Present – Imagining the Future (Autonomedia, 2009). He is currently working with Michael Heinrich on a book on critical theory and political economy, to be published in German in 2009.

Notes

(1) Cf. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1983, p. 85.

(2) Karl Marx, Capital, op.cit., p. 447.

(3) Karl Marx, Capital, vol. III, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1966, p. 818. On class as a negative concept, see Werner Bonefeld, ‘Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation. On Class and Constitution’, in Dinerstein, A.C. and M. Neary (eds.), The Labour Debate, Aldershot, Ashgate.

(4) Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, op.cit, p. 707. On the permanence of primitive accumulation and associated forms of exploitation, see, for example Mariarosa Dalla Costa, ‘Capitalism and Reproduction’, and Midnight Notes, ‘The New Enclosures, both in Werner Bonefeld (Hersg), Imagining the Future – Subverting the Present, Autonomedia, New York, 2008.

(5) See Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Social Theory, second edition, Palgrave, London, 1992, for a an account of Adam Smith’s conception of class and modern sociology, including one has to add, its analytical and structuralist Marxist off-springs. See Werner Bonefeld, ‘Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation’, in Ana Dinerstein / Mike Neary (Hersg), The Labour Debate, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1992.

(6) See Karl Marx, Capital volume I, op cit., p. 559.

(7) Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, op.cit., p. 546.

(8) See Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Vom Ende der abstrakten Arbeit, Materialis MP 23, Materialis Verlag, Frankfurt, 1984, pp. 115-16. ‘Objective possibility’ is of course a Weberian term: objects have no possibilities, subjects do. Objective possibilities are a product of social relations, and possess their validity only for and within these relations. The human subject objectifies herself in the object, however perverted (verrrückt) this object might be in the form of capital.

(9) Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Vorlesungen zur Einführung ins ‘Kapital’, 6th Ausgabe, Argument Verlag, Hamburg, 2005, p. 11.

(10) Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels, Die heilige Familie, MEW 2, Dietz, Berlin, 1980, p. 98.

(11) Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin, London, 1973, p. 105.

(12) In the 1980s, Ernest Mandel illustrated this dissociation by speaking about an upside down pyramid, in which an ever-increasing credit-superstructure is supported by a receding base – productive accumulation. This upside down pyramid presents a huge, potentially irredeemable mortgage on the future exploitation of labour. The ‘golden age’ of post-war capitalism is now a memory, as is the blood-letting through war and gas. What the resolution to irredeemable debt can mean, stands behind us as a warning of a possibly nightmarish future. See Ernest Mandel Die Krise, Konkret, Hamburg, 1987. I have analysed this development in The Recomposition of the British State During the 1980s, Dartmouth, Aldershot, 1993, and updated in ‘Human Progress and Capitalist Development’, in Andreas Bieler et al., Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour, Palgrave, London, 2006. The argument on the radicality of the challenge draws on Ricardo Bellofiore, ‘Lavori in Corso’, Common Sense, 22, 1997.

(13) Joachim Hirsch, ‘The State Apparatus and Social Reproduction’, in Holloway, J. and S. Picciotto (eds.)State and Capital, Arnold, London, p. 75, emphasis added.

(14) See Joachim Hirsch / Roland Roth, Das neue Gesicht des Kapitalismus, VSA, Hamburg, 1986, p. 37.

(15) It would be unfair to attribute this point to Hirsch. It belongs to the second and third Internationals, and the structuralist traditions, most prominently Althusser, upon whom Hirsch draws. See Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983, for a critique of structuralist theories of history. See John Holloway, Change the World without Taking Power, Pluto, London, 2nd ed., 2005, for an account on the making of history.

(16) Louis Althusser, ‘Averstissement aux lecteurs du Capital’, Preface to the paperback edition of Le Capital I, Paris, Ed. Sociales, 1969, p. 7.

(17) Marx’s mockery is as topical now as it was then: ‘what divides these gentlemen from the bourgeois apologist is, on the one side, their sensitivity to the contradictions included in the system; on the other, the utopian inability to grasp the necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society, which is the cause of their desire to undertake the superfluous business of realizing the ideal expression again, which is in fact only the inverted projection [Lichtbild] of this reality’ (Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., 1973, pp. 248-49). Communism does not derive from capitalism. Nor does it compete with capitalism. It is an alternative to capitalism. On this see Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1999. See also Simon Clarke, Marx,Marginalism and Modern Sociology, Palgrave, London, 2nd ed. 1992. Clarke argues that orthodox Marxism derives its concepts and analysis from classical political economy, by-passing Marx’s critique of political economy.

(18) Karl Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 87.

(19) Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, in MEW 13, Dietz, Berlin, 1981, p. 8.

(20) Johannes Agnoli, Subversive Theorie. “Die Sache selbst” und ihre Geschichte, Ça ira, Freiburg, 1996, p. 29.

(21) Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, Bergin and Garvey, Massachusetts, 1984, p. 72.

(22) In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production…Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised Man [Mensch], the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by the blind forces of Nature…But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis’. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. III, op.cit, p. 820. See the exchange between Wildcat and John Holloway for an assessment. Wildcat and John Holloway, ‘Wildcat (Germany) reads John Holloway – A Debate on Marxism and the Politics of Dignity’, Common Sense, no. 24, 1999.

(23) Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, op.cit., p. 53. See Simon Clarke, Marx’s Theory of Crisis, Palgrave, London, 1993, for a succinct treatment of this point.

(24) Ferruccio Gambino, ‘A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School’, in Werner Bonefeld (Hersg.),Revolutionary Writing, Autonomedia, New York, 2003, p. 104. The social calamity of capitalist development is taken from Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, op. cit., p. 416.

(25) As the father of modern utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, put it when recommending that children be made to work at the age of four rather than fourteen: ‘ten precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual!’ Quoted in Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2000, p. 22.

(26) Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. B. Brewster, Verso, London, 1996. Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Theorie und Geschichte. Kurze Bemerkung über den Gegenstand des “Kapitals”’, in Walter Euchner / Alfred Schmidt (Hersg.) Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. 100 Jahre Kapital, EVA, Frankfurt, 1968.

(27) See Beverley Silver, Forces of Labour, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. Wildcat, Unruhen in China, Beilage der Wildcat No. 80, Dezember 2007. John Holloway, ‘Zapata in Wallstreet’, in Werner Bonefeld / Kosmas Psychopedis (Hersg.) The Politics of Change, Palgrave, London, 2000; and Werner Bonefeld / John Holloway ‘Money and Class Struggle’, in ibid. (ed.) Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, Palgrave, London, 1996.

(28) Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, Merlin, London, 1970, p. 172. Ernst Bloch, Logos der Materie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2000. Oskar Negt / Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993. Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin, London, 2004. Negri’s biologised subject complements Althusser’s naturalised objectivity. On this, see my ‘Human Practice and Perversion: Beyond Autonomy and Structure’, in Werner Bonefeld (Hersg), Revolutionary Writing, op. cit.

(29) Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Newspaper Interview, El Nuevo Diario, Managua, April 25, 1990.

(30) See Michel Löwy, ‘Dialectica de civilizacion: barbarie y modernidad en el siglo XX’, Herramienta, no. 22, 2003. For a conceptualization of the means and ends of human emancipation, see the collection of essays published in Werner Bonefeld / Sergio Tischler (Hersg) What is to be Done? Leninism, Anti-Leninist Marxism and  the Question of Revolution Today, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002. For an account on the fate of workers’ self-organisation in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, see Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, Routledge, London, 2008. See Ana Dinerstein ‘Lessons from a Journey: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina’, in Werner Bonefeld, Subversion…, op. cit., on the incorporation of the majority of the Piqueteros into the state under the first Kirchner administration.

(31) Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Pluto, London, 1996, p. 28.

(32) Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, op. cit., p. 233.

(33) See note 27.

(34) Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, op.cit., pp. 18-19.

(35) ‘Die Freiheit ist ein leerer Wahn, solange eine Menschenklasse die andere ungestraft aushungern kann. Die Gleichheit ist ein leerer Wahn, solange der Reiche mit dem Monopol das Recht über Leben und Tod seiner Mitmenschen ausübt’. Jacques Roux, ‘Das “Manifest der Enragés”’, in Jacques Roux, Freiheit wird die Welt erobern, Reden und Schriften, Röderberg, Frankfurt/a.M., 1985, p. 147.  Roux belonged to the Enragés, the Reds of the French Revolution.

(36) Enlarging on Agnoli’s argument on subversion (Thesis IV), Man objects to be treated as a mere economic resource.

(37) Karl Marx, Die deutsche Ideologie, op.cit, p. 26.

(38) Walter Benjamin, ‘Geschichtsphilosphische Thesen’ in Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze Suhrkamp, Franfkurt, 1965, p. 84.

(39) Simon Clarke, ‘Class Struggle and the Global Overaccumulation of Capital’, in Robert Albritton etal. (Hersg), Phases of Capitalist Development, Palgrave, London, 2001, pp. 90-91.

(40) Karl Marx, Zur Judenfrage, in MEW 1, Dietz, Berlin, 1964, p. 370.

(41) Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung, I MEW 1, Dietz, Berlin, 1956, p. 385.

Dave Hill 

This article calls for transformative activism by education and other cultural workers – teachers, lecturers, journalists – in order to develop an economically just economy, polity and society. It sets out key characteristics of neo-liberal global capitalism (and, importantly, its accompanying neoconservatism) and its major effects on society and education. It highlights the obscene and widening economic, social and educational inequalities both within states and, globally, between states; the detheorisation of education and the regulating of critical thought and activists through the ideological and repressive state apparatuses; and the limitation and regulation of democracy and democratic accountability at national and local educational levels.

The article analyses three components of the ‘Capitalist Agenda for/in Education’ within the current neo-liberal globalising project of Capital, and, calls for critical engagement with – challenging – the Radical Right in its neoliberal, Conservative, traditionalist religious, and its social democratic (sometimes revised as ‘Third way’) manifestations. It also calls for engagement with ideological and cultural fashions and with fashionable ‘knowledge workers’ within the media and the academy – fashions such as postmodernism, which, together with social democracy/ left revisionism, ultimately serve the function of ‘naturalising’ neo-liberal Capital as the dominating ‘common sense’. They do this partly by virtue of their ignoring, or deriding Marxist derived/ related concepts of social class, class conflict and socialism. Such academic fashions as postmodernism and left revisionism debilitate and displace viable solidaristic socialist counter-hegemonic struggles.

What role can we, as critical transformative and revolutionary socialist educators and cultural/media workers play in ensuring that the Capitalism, with its dystopian class-based apartheid, is replaced by an economic and social system more economically and socially just and environmentally sustainable than national/ international Capitalist, state Capitalist, social democratic and (secular or religious) traditionalist alternatives?

1. Neoliberal Global Capital and the Current Crisis of Capitalism

In the current juncture, the crisis of capitalism, as in the repeated crises of capital and overproduction and speculation predicted by Marx, capitalists have a big problem. Their profits, the value of the shares and part control of companies by Chief Executive Officers and other capitalist executives (late twentieth century capitalists), so carefully and successfully wrested back from the social and economic gains made by workers during the 1940, 50s and 60s  (Harvey, 2005; Dumenil and Levy, 2004) are plummeting. The rate of profit is falling, has fallen.(1)

The political response to ‘the credit crunch’, the current crisis of capital, in particular finance capital, by parties funded by Capital, such as the Democrats and Republicans in the USA, and Labour, Liberal and Conservative Parties in the UK, and conservative and social democrat parties globally is not to blame the capitalist system. Not even to blame the neoliberal form of capitalism (new brutalist public managerialism/ management methods, privatisation, businessification of education, for example, increasing gaps between rich and poor, between schools in well-off areas and schools in poor areas).

They have criticised only two aspects of neoliberalism: what they now (and only now!) see as the over-extent of deregulation, and the (obscene) levels of pay and reward taken by ‘the big bankers’, by a few Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). No criticism of the capitalist system itself, despite a few late 2008 press items ‘was Marx right’?

What is Neo-liberal Capitalism?

For neo-liberals, ‘profit is the God’, not the public good. Capitalism is not kind. Plutocrats are not, essentially, or even commonly, philanthropic. In Capitalism it is the insatiable demand for profit that is the motor for policy, not public or social or common weal, or good. With great power comes great irresponsibility. Thus privatised utilities, such as the railway system, health and education services (schools, trade/vocational education, universities), free and clean water supply, gas and electricity supply, are run, just as much as factories and finance houses, to maximise owners’ and shareholders’ profits and rewards, rather than to provide a public service.

The current and recently (since the 1970s and 1980s) globally dominant form of Capitalism, neo-liberalism, requires that the state establishes and extends the following policies:

1. The control of inflation by interest rates, preferably by an independent central bank.

2. The balancing of budgets, which should not be used to influence demand – or at any rate to stimulate it. (In the current credit crisis this policy has been put on hold/ reversed)

3. The privatisation/private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

4. The provision of a Market in goods and services—including private sector involvement in welfare, social, educational and other state services (such as schools, health services, savings banks, air traffic control, pensions, postal deliveries, prisons, policing, railways).

5. Within education, the creation and exacerbation, through selection, of ‘opportunity’ to acquire the means of education (though not necessarily education itself) and additional cultural Capital.

6. The relatively untrammelled selling and buying of labour power, for a ‘flexible’, poorly regulated labour market, deregulation of the labour market—for labour flexibility (with consequences for education in providing an increasingly hierarchicalised schooling and university system).

7. The restructuring of the management of the welfare state on the basis of a corporate managerialist model imported from the world of business, known as new public managerialism.

8. The deriding and suppression of oppositional counter-hegemonic critical thought, spaces and thinkers/ activists within the media and education.

9. Within a regime of denigration and humbling of publicly provided services. (With the temporary re-adoption of Keynesian public works measures- the state stepping in- and state investment, this is currently, at times, somewhat mitigated

10. Within a regime of cuts in the post-war Welfare State, the withdrawal of state subsidies and support, and low public expenditure- except, in the current credit crunch, for the trillions of dollars capitalist states are now spending on bailing out the banks and some companies/ corporations.

Internationally, neo-liberalism requires that:

1. Barriers to international trade and capitalist enterprise should be removed.

2. There should be a ‘level playing field’ for companies of any nationality within all sectors of national economies.

3. Trade rules and regulations, such as the General Agreement on Trade in Services (the GATS), are necessary to underpin ‘free’ trade, with a system for penalising ‘unfair’ trade policies.

One increasingly important proviso, in the face of growing Chinese and Indian economic muscle and exports, is that

4.  Rich and powerful countries reserve the right to exempt themselves from these rules, to slap on quotas, and to continue subsidising their own agricultural industry, for example the subsidies afforded to agricultural production in the USA and the European Union.

What are the Results of Neo-Liberalism? Widening Inequalities

Impacts of Neoliberal Capitalism

In its current Neo-Liberal form in particular, Capitalism leads to human degradation and inhumanity and increased social class inequalities within states and globally.

Neo-liberal policies globally have resulted in

1: a loss of Equity, Economic and Social Justice for citizens and for workers at work

2: a loss of Democracy and Democratic Control and Democratic Accountability

3: a loss of Critical Thought and Space.

The Growth of National and Global Inequalities

Inequalities both between states and within states have increased dramatically during the era of global neo-liberalism. Global Capital, in its current neo-liberal form in particular, leads to human degradation and inhumanity and increased social class inequalities within states and globally. These effects are increasing (racialized and gendered) social class inequality within states, increasing (racialized and gendered) social class inequality between states. The degradation and Capitalisation of humanity, including the environmental degradation impact primarily in a social class related manner. Those who can afford to buy clean water don’t die of thirst or diarrhoea. In many states across the globe, those who can afford school or university fees, where charges are made, end up without formal education or in grossly inferior provision.

Hearse (2009) points out that

The golden age for the salaried worker across all the OECD countries was between 1945 and 1973, when ordinary working people gained their highest percentage share of GDP. Since then the real wages of the middle and working class have stagnated or fallen, while income for the rich has rocketed and that of the super-rich has hit the stratosphere.(2)

The current form of globalisation is tightening rather than loosening the international poverty trap. Living standards in the least developed countries are now lower than thirty years ago. Inequalities within states have widened partly because of the generalised attack on workers’ rights and trade unions, with restrictive laws passed hamstringing trade union actions (Rosskam, 2006. See also Hill, 2006a, 2009a, b; Hill and Kumar, 2009; Hill and Rosskam, 2009). And it is workers now being asked to pay for the crisis. Under capitalism, it usually is. It is workers and their trade unions voluntarily, or under pressure, accepting cuts in pay and conditions. It is workers and their families in the advanced capitalist world whose children will pay back the state for the billions of dollars handed to industrial and finance capital.

The Growth of education quasi-markets and markets and the growth of educational inequality

There is considerable data globally on how, within marketised or quasi-marketised education systems, poor schools have, by and large, got poorer (in terms of relative education results and in terms of total income) and how rich schools (in the same terms) have got richer.(3) Whitty, Power and Halpin (1998) examined the effects of the introduction of quasi-markets into education systems in USA, Sweden, England and Wales, Australia and New Zealand. Their conclusion is that one of the results of marketizing education is that increasing ‘parental choice’ of schools, and/ or setting up new types of schools, in effect increases school choice of parents and their children and thereby sets up or exacerbates racialized school hierarchies (4).

Hirtt comments on the apparently contradictory education policies of Capital, “to adapt education to the needs of business and at the same time reduce state expenditure on education”. He suggests that, for neoliberal Capital, “it is now possible and even highly recommendable to have a more polarized education system…. education should not try to transmit a broad common culture to the majority of future workers, but instead it should teach them some basic, general skills” (Hirtt, 2004 p. 446; see also Hirtt, 2009).

The Growth of Undemocratic (Un)accountability

Within education and other public services business values and interests are increasingly substituted for democratic accountability and the collective voice. This applies at the local level, where, in Britain, the USA, Pakistan and many other countries, for example, private companies- national or transnational- variously build, own, run and govern state schools and other sections of local government educational services. There is an important democratic question here. Is it right to allow private provides of educational services based outside India, or Brazil, or Britain, for example. Where is the local democratic accountability? In the event of abuse or corruption or simply pulling out and closing down operations, where and how would those guilty be held to account?

This anti-democratisation applies too at national levels. GATS locks countries into a system of regulations making it virtually impossible for governments to change policy, or, indeed, for voters to choose a new government with different policies.(5)

Detheorised Education and the Loss of Critical Thought   

The increasing subordination and commodification of education, including university education have been well-documented (6). In my own work I have examined how the British government has, in effect, expelled most potentially critical aspects of education, such as sociological and political examination of schooling and education, and questions of social class, ‘race’ and gender, from the national curriculum for what is now, in England and Wales, termed ‘teacher training’ (7). It was formerly called ‘teacher education’. The change in name is important both symbolically and in terms of actual accurate description of the new, ‘safe’, sanitised and detheorised education and training of new teachers.

‘How to’ has replaced ‘why to’ in a technicist curriculum based on ‘delivery’ of a quietist and overwhelmingly conservative set of ‘standards’ for student teachers. Teachers are now, by and large, trained in skills rather than educated to examine the ‘whys’ and the ‘why nots’ and the contexts of curriculum, pedagogy, educational purposes and structures and the effects these have on reproducing Capitalist economy, society and politics.(8)

2. Social Class Exploitation

The development of (‘raced’ and gendered) social class-based ‘labour-power’ and the subsequent extraction of ‘surplus value’ – is the fundamental characteristic of Capitalism. It is the primary explanation for economic, political, cultural and ideological change. Social Class is the essential and dominant form of Capitalist exploitation and oppression.

What is The Project of Global Capitalism at this current time of Capitalist Crisis? 

The fundamental principle of Capitalism is the sanctification of private (or, corporate) profit based on the extraction of surplus labour (unpaid labour-time) as surplus value from the labour-power of workers. This is a creed of competition, not co-operation, between humans. It is a creed and practice of (racialized and gendered) class exploitation, exploitation by the Capitalist class, the bourgeoisie. ‘By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor’ (Engels, 1888), of those who provide the profits through their labour – the working class, the proletariat, ‘the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live’ (Engels, 1888).

The State and Education: Labour Power, Surplus Value, Profit

In Britain and elsewhere, both Conservative and New Labour governments have attempted to ‘conform’ both the existing teacher workforce and the future teacher workforce (i.e. student teachers) and their teachers, the reproducers of teachers ? the teacher educators. Why conform the teachers and the teacher educators at all? Like poets, teachers are potentially dangerous. But poets are fewer and reading poetry is voluntary. Schooling is not. Teachers’ work is the production and reproduction of knowledge, attitudes and ideology.

Glenn Rikowski (9) develops a Marxist analysis based on an analysis of ‘labour power’ – the capacity to labour. With respect to education, he suggests that teachers are the most dangerous of workers because they have a special role in shaping, developing and forcing the single commodity on which the whole Capitalist system rests: labour-power. In the Capitalist labour process, labour-power is transformed into value-creating labour, and, at a certain point, surplus value – value over-and-above that represented in the worker’s wage – is created. Surplus-value is the first form of the existence of Capital. It is the lifeblood of Capital. Most importantly for the Capitalist, is that part of the surplus-value forms his or her profit – and it is this that drives the Capitalist on a personal basis.

In particular, it becomes clear, on this analysis, that the Capitalist State will seek to destroy any forms of pedagogy that attempt to educate students regarding their real predicament – to create an awareness of themselves as future labour-powers and to underpin this awareness with critical insight that seeks to undermine the smooth running of the social production of labour-power. This fear entails strict control of teacher education, of the curriculum, of educational research.

The Salience and Essential Nature of Social Class Exploitation within Capitalism

Social class is the inevitable and defining feature of Capitalist exploitation, whereas the various other forms of oppression are not essential to its nature and continuation, however much they are commonly functional to this – and however obviously racialised and gendered capitalist oppression is in most countries. The face of poverty staring out from post-Katrina New Orleans was overwhelmingly black. It was overwhelmingly black working class. But it was also poor white working class. Richer black and white car owners drove away.

Within the educational curricula and pedagogy, and within the media (and, indeed, wherever resistant teachers and other cultural workers can find spaces) the existence of various and multiple forms of oppression and the similarity of their effects on individuals and communities should not disguise nor weaken class analysis that recognises the structural centrality of social class exploitation and conflict (10). In capitalist society this has consequences for political and social strategy, for mobilisation and for action).

As McLaren notes, ‘the key here is not to privilege class oppression over other forms of oppression but to see how Capitalist relations of production provide the ground from which other forms of oppression are produced’ (McLaren, 2001: 31).

McLaren and Farahmandpur note that ‘recognizing the ‘class character’ of education in Capitalist schooling, and advocating a ‘socialist re-organisation of Capitalist society’ (Krupskaya, 1973) are two fundamental principles of a revolutionary critical pedagogy’ (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2001: 299. See also McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005).

Marxist and Postmodernist Analyses of Social Class

Outside the Marxist tradition, it is clear that many critics of class analysis confound class-consciousness with the fact of class – and tend to deduce the non-existence of the latter from the ‘absence’ of the former, or, if not ‘the absence’, then the decline in salience in advanced capitalist countries. The collapse of many traditional signifiers of ‘working-classness’ has led many to pronounce the demise of class yet ‘Class inequality exists beyond its theoretical representation’. (Skeggs, 1997:6).

Marx took great pains to stress that social class is distinct from economic class and necessarily includes a political dimension which, in the broadest sense, is ‘culturally’ rather than ‘economically’ determined. Class-consciousness, a cultural phenomenon, does not follow automatically or inevitably from the fact of (economic) class position. In The Poverty of Philosophy [1847] Marx distinguishes a ‘class-in-itself’ (class position) and a ‘class-for itself’ (class consciousness) and, in The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1848), explicitly identified the ‘formation of the proletariat into a class’ as the key political task facing the communists. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon [1852], Marx observes:

In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their cultural formation from those of the other classes and bring them into conflict with those classes, they form a class. In so far as these small peasant proprietors are merely connected on a local basis, and the identity of their interests fails to produce a feeling of community, national links, or a political organisation, they do not form a class. (Marx [1852] in Tucker, 1974: 239).

The recognition by Marx that class consciousness is not necessarily or directly produced from the material and objective fact of class position, enables neo-Marxists to acknowledge the wide range of contemporary influences that may (or may not) inform the subjective consciousness of identity – but in doing so, to retain the crucial reference to the basic economic determinant of social experience.

The notion of an essential, unitary self was rejected, over a century and a half ago, by Marx in his Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach, where he stated

But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.(Marx, [1845] in Tucker, 1978: 45).

The absence of class in postmodern theory actively contributes to the ideological disarmament of the working- class movement.(11)

The fundamental significance of economic production for Marxist theory integrates a range of analytic concepts, which include the metanarrative of social development and therefore the proposal of viable transformatory educational and political projects. In contrast, the local, specific and partial analyses that mark the limitations of postmodernism are accompanied by either a lack of, or opposition to, social-class based policy.

3. The Education and Media Ideological State Apparatuses.

Education and the Media are the dominant Ideological State Apparatuses, though from the USA to Iran and elsewhere, religion is also assuming a more salient role. Each Ideological State Apparatuses contains disciplinary Repressive moments and effects.

One of its greatest achievements is that Capital presents itself as natural, free and democratic and that any attack on free-market neoliberal capitalism is damned as anti-democratic. Any attack on capitalism becomes characterised as an attack on world freedom and democracy itself. As does any attack on the ‘freedom of the Press’, with its ‘mass production of ignorance’ (Davies, 2009).

The most powerful, restraint on Capital (and the political parties funded and influenced by Capitalists in their bountiful donations) is that Capital needs to persuade the people that neo-liberalism – competition, privatisation, poorer standards of public services, greater inequalities between rich and poor – are legitimate. If not, there is a delegitimation crisis, government and the existing system are seen through as grossly unfair and inhumane. It may also be seen as in the pocket of the international and/or national ruling classes and their local and national state weaponry.

To minimise this delegitimation, to ensure that the majority of the population considers the government and the economic system of private monopoly ownership is legitimate, the state uses the ideological state apparatuses such as schools and colleges and the Media to ‘naturalise’ Capitalism – to make the existing status quo seem ‘only natural’. Even in especially in capitalist crisis, such as the present juncture. Of course, if and when this doesn’t work, the repressive state apparatuses kick in – sometimes literally, with steel-capped military boots, water cannons, draconian legislation and coups d’etat.

The term ‘State Apparatus’ does not refer solely to apparatuses such as Ministries and various levels of government. It applies to those societal apparatuses, institutions and agencies that operate on behalf of, and maintain the existing economic and social relations of production. In other words, the apparatuses that sustain Capital, Capitalism and Capitalists.

Educators and cultural workers are implicated in the process of economic, cultural and ideological reproduction. (Kelsh and Hill, 2006).

Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses  

Althusser argues that the ideological dominance of the ruling class is, like its political dominance, secured in and through definite institutional forms and practices: the ideological apparatuses of the state. As Althusser suggests, every Ideological State Apparatus is also in part a Repressive State Apparatus (12), punishing those who dissent:

There is no such thing as a purely ideological apparatus … Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection etc., to ‘discipline’ not only their shepherds, but also their flocks. (Althusser, 1971: 138)

Ideological State Apparatuses have internal ‘coercive’ practices (for example, the forms of punishment, non-promotion, displacement, being ‘out-of-favour’ experienced by socialists and trade union activists/ militants historically and currently across numerous countries). Similarly, Repressive State Apparatuses attempt to secure significant internal unity and wider social authority through ideology (for example, through their ideologies of patriotism and national integrity). Every Repressive State Apparatus therefore has an ideological moment, propagating a version of common sense and attempting to legitimate it under threat of sanction.

Governments, and the ruling classes in whose interests they act, prefer to use the second form of state apparatuses – the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). Changing the school and initial teacher education curriculum, abandoning ‘general studies’ and ‘liberal studies’ and horizon-broadening in the UK for working class ‘trade’ and skilled worker students/ apprentices in ‘Further Education’ (vocational) colleges, is less messy than sending the troops onto the streets or visored baton-wielding police into strike-bound mining villages, or against peasant demonstrations or protests by the landless.

4. Capitalist Agendas and Education

Global Neo-Liberal Capital and its international and national apparatuses have an anti-human and anti-critical Business Agenda for Education and the Media.

The Contexts of Educational Change and the neo-Liberal Project

The restructuring of the schooling and education systems across the world needs to be placed within the ideological and policy context of the links between Capital, neo-liberalism (with its combination of privatisation, competitive markets in education characterised by selection and exclusion) and the rampant growth of the national and international inequalities.

The current crisis of capital accumulation – the declining rate of profit, has given an added urgency to the neo-liberal project for education globally.

Cutting Public Expenditure

Not only have education and the media the function for Capitalism of creating and reproducing a labour force fit for Capitalism, but Capital also requires (in ‘normal times’, i.e. not necessarily all the time) cutting public spending, cutting the social wage (the cost and value of the state pensions, health and education services) (Hill, 2001a, b, 2003, 2004), reducing the ‘tax-take’ as a proportion of gross domestic product.  These are all subject to the variegations of short-term policy and local political considerations such as upcoming elections or mass demonstrations, the balance of class forces- the objective and subjective current labour-capital relation (relationship between the capitalist class and the working class and their relative cohesiveness, organisation, leadership and will).

Capital and the Business of Education 

The Capitalist state has a Capitalist Agenda for Education and a Business Plan in Education (13). It also has a Capitalist Agenda for Education Business. The Capitalist Agenda for education centres on socially producing labour-power (people’s capacity to labour) for Capitalist enterprises. The Capitalist Agenda in Education focuses on setting business ‘free’ in education for profit-making.

The first aim is to ensure that schooling and education engage in ideological and economic reproduction. National state education and training policies in the Capitalist Agenda for education are of increasing importance for national capital. In an era of global capital, this is one of the few remaining areas for national state intervention – it is the site, suggests Hatcher (2001), where a state can make a difference. Thus, Capital firstly requires education fit for business – to make schooling and further and higher education geared to producing the personality, ideological and economic requirements of Capital.

Secondly, Capital wants to make profits from education and other privatised public services such as water supply and healthcare. The second aim – the Capitalist Agenda in Education – is for private enterprise, private capitalists, to make money out of it, to make private profit out of it, to control it, whether by outright control through private chains of schools/ universities, by selling services to state funded schools and education systems, or by voucher systems through which taxpayers subsidise the owners of private schools.

Thus, business firstly education fit for business- to make schooling and further and higher education subordinate to the personality, ideological and economic requirements of capital, to make sure schools produce compliant, ideologically indoctrinated, pro capitalist, effective workers.

The third education business plan for capital, the Capitalist for Education Business, is to ‘bring the bucks back home’, for governments in globally dominant economic positions (e.g. the UK, the USA), or in locally dominant economic positions (e.g. Australia, New Zealand, Brazil) to support locally based corporations (or, much more commonly, locally based transnational corporations) in profit taking from the privatisation and neoliberalisation of education services globally (14).

Capitalist Responses to the Current Crisis: Not an end to Capitalism or even to Neoliberal Capitalism

Talk of an end to neoliberalism is premature, so is talk of an end to capitalism. Criticism in the mainstream capitalist media and mainstream capitalist political parties is only of the excesses of Capitalism, indeed, only the excesses of that form of capitalism – neoliberal capitalism – that has been dominant since the 1970s, the Thatcher-Reagan years – dominant in countries across the globe, and within the international capitalist organisations such as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the World Trade Organisation.

Premature, too, is talk of a return to a new Keynesianism, a new era of public sector public works, together with (in revulsion at neoliberalism’s – in fact – capitalism’s excesses) a new Puritanism in private affairs/ private industry.

The current intervention by governments across the globe to ‘save banks’ can be seen as ‘socialism for the rich’, a spreading of the pain and costs amongst all citizens/ taxpayers to bail out the banks and bankers. Side by side with this bailing out of the banks (while retaining them as private- not nationalised institutions!) is the privatisation, and individualisation of pain- the pain that will be felt in wallets and homes and workplaces throughout the capitalist countries, both rich and poor. Already in January 2009 the Conservative Party in Britain changed its previous policy of matching Labour’s spending plans for 2010 onwards into a rightward slide – saying that public services will have to suffer, to pay for the cost of the crisis. Capitalist governments throughout the world will, unless successfully contested by class war and action from below, make the workers and their/ our public services, pay for the crisis.

Capital and the parties it funds will, seek to ensure that Capital is resurgent, and that after what they see as this temporary ‘blip’ in capitalist profitability, it will once again see to confidently bestride the world, though with less of an obvious smirk on its face, and with less obvious flashing of riches. At least for the time being.

In times such as these, of economic crisis and of the inevitable retrenchment, it will be the poor that the capitalist class tries to make pay for the crisis, in fact, not just the poor, but the middle and lower strata of the working class.

Controlling the Workers

And who better to ‘control’ the workers, the workforce, to sell a deal – cuts in the actual wage (relative to inflation) and the social wage (cuts in the real value of benefits and of public welfare and social services) – but the former workers’ parties such as the Labour Party, or, in the USA, the party with (as with labour in Britain) links to the trade union movement – the Democrats. So US Capital swung massively behind Obama in the US Presidential election, and large sections of British Capital have swing behind Gordon Brown and what is still regarded by many as a workers’ party, or at least, the more social democratic of the major parties on offer. Better to control the workers when the cuts do come. And to return to a slightly less flashy form of capitalism – more regulated, but still the privatising neoliberal managerialising, commodifying, neo-colonial and imperialistic capitalism in ideological conjunction with neoconservative state force.

5. Marxism and Resistance to Neo-Liberal Capital 

Forms and Ideologies of Resistance to Neo-Liberal Capital should be critiqued from a democratic structuralist neo-Marxist political and ideological perspective.

The Right and Revised Social Democracy

Social democratic advances of ‘the thirty glorious years’ of the forties to the seventies (the post-war boom in advanced capitalist economies) did succeed in some redistribution of life chances across a number of booming industrialised states. And what there was, was important- welfare states, pensions, state provided social housing, minimum wages, trade union recognition and rights, rights for workers at work, equal opportunities legislation on grounds of ‘race’, gender, sexuality, disability. These are not to be sneered at. They have improved the lives of hundreds of millions.

But so much more could have been done! (15) And needs to be done. And, since the 1970s in particular, with crises of capital accumulation, these hard-won rights, the ‘social wage’, state comprehensive provision of services such as education, health, pensions, transport- have been widely degraded, privatised, and/ or sold off to Capital. This really is, as Harvey exclaims, ‘class war from above’ (Harvey, 2005). This class war from above has been successful, other than where street resistance has numbered millions, stalling government neoliberalising plans.

Radical Right and Centrist ideology on education serves a society aiming only for the hegemony of the few and the entrenchment of privilege, whether elitist or supposedly meritocratic – not the promotion of economic and social justice with more equal educational and economic outcomes.

Structuralist Neo-Marxism, Agency and the State

The autonomy and agency available to individual teachers, teacher educators, schools and departments of education, journalists and other cultural workers is particularly circumscribed when faced with the structures of Capital and its current neo-liberal project for education.

The differences between the structuralist neo-Marxism I am putting forward here and culturalist neo-Marxism are that culturalist neo-Marxists, such as Michael Apple, overemphasise autonomy and agency in a number of ways. Firstly, they overemphasise the importance of ideology, of the cultural domain. Secondly, and connectedly, they rate too highly the importance of discourse. Thirdly they lay too much store on the relative autonomy of individuals, on how effective human agency is likely to be when faced with the force of the state, without overall, major change and transformation of the economy, and society. Fourthly, they overemphasise the relative autonomy of state apparatuses such as education, or particular schools. Fifthly, they overestimate the relative autonomy of the political region of the state from the economic – the autonomy of government from capital (See Cole et al, 2001, Hill, 2001a; 2005b. In Apple’s case (e.g. Apple, 2004, 2005, 2006) they also underplay the salience of social class- racialised and gended and layered though it is, as the primary and the essential form of exploitation in capitalist society (Kelsh, 2001; Kelsh and Hill, 2006) (16).

To use concepts derived from Louis Althusser, the autonomy of the education policy/political region of the state from the economic has been straightjacketed. There are, in many states, greater and greater restrictions on the ability of cultural workers and teachers to use their pedagogical spaces for emancipatory purposes.

Spaces do exist for counter-hegemonic struggle; whatever space does exist should be exploited. Whatever we can do, we must do, however fertile or unfertile the soil at any given moment in any particular place. But schools and colleges, and newsrooms and studios are not the only place for resistance and transformation. In the current crisis of Capital, the streets are, too. And the workplace, the social group, the social and community organisation, the trade union.

6. Critical Education for Economic and Social Justice

Critical Education for Economic and Social Justice can play a role in resisting the depredations and the ‘common-sense’ of Global Neo-Liberal Capital and play a role in developing class-consciousness and an egalitarian sustainable future.

Critical Education for Economic and Social Justice is where teachers and other Cultural Workers act as Critical Transformative and Public Intellectuals within and outside of sites of economic, ideological and cultural reproduction. Such activity is both deconstructive and reconstructive, offering a Utopian Politics of Anger, Analysis and Hope based on a materialised socialist, or revolutionary, Critical Pedagogy that recognises, yet challenges, the strength of the structures and apparatuses of Capital.

Such activity encompasses activity within different arenas of Resistant and Revolutionary activity. These arenas encompass

·    Activism within the Cultural Sites of Schooling/Education and the Media within the workforce, within the curriculum/ knowledge validation systems, and within pedagogy/social relations
·    Activism locally outside of these sites, exposing the Capitalist reproductive nature of those sites both per se, and Activism locally, linked to other sites of economic, ideological and cultural contestation, mobilisations and struggle
·    Activism within Mass movements, United Fronts, and within democratic Marxist/ Socialist groupings, fractions and organisations.

The Role of Intellectuals and the Politics of Educational Transformation

What role can intellectuals such as educators and other cultural workers play in the struggle for economic and social justice? Support the current system?

1. Ignore it?

2. Play with the postmodernists in irony and pastiche, body performativity and transgression, textual and semiotic deconstruction, shorn of any solidaristic reconstructive urge or capacity (however enjoyable and individually liberating they can certainly be)?

3. Or should education and other cultural workers organise in opposition to ‘the excesses’ of Capital, seeking its modification, seeking to ‘reform’ it? Or should resistant counter-hegemonic educators and cultural workers seek its replacement, its transformation. But it’s transformation into what?

4. A religious state, a theocracy, Christian, or Zionist, or Islamic, or Hindu or whatever?

5. Or its replacement by democratic socialism.

These are five alternatives for intellectuals and educators- and, indeed by all workers who are aware of such choices.

Within classrooms critical transformative intellectuals seek to enable student teachers and teachers (and school students) to critically evaluate a range of salient perspectives and ideologies – including critical reflection itself – while showing a commitment to egalitarianism. Critical pedagogy must remain self-critical, and critique its own presumed role as the metatruth of educational criticism. This does not imply forced acceptance or silencing of contrary perspectives. But it does involve a privileging of egalitarian and emancipatory perspectives. But the aim is not egalitarian indoctrination.

Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy

McLaren and Farahmandpur (2005) ask, ‘how do we organize teachers and students against domestic trends [e.g. the deepening inequalities and exploitation under Capital] … and also enable them to link these trends to global capitalism and the new imperialism? What pedagogical discourses and approaches can we use?’  They cite the five pillars of popular education articulated by Deborah Brandt (1991).

First, critical pedagogy must be a collective process that involves utilizing     a dialogical (i.e., Freirean) learning approach.

Second, critical pedagogy has to be critical; that is, it must locate the underlying causes of class exploitation and economic oppression within the     social, political, and economic arrangements of capitalist social relations of production.

Third, …it reconstructs and makes the social world intelligible by transforming and translating theory into concrete social and political activity.

Fourth, critical pedagogy should be participatory. It involves building     coalitions among community members, grassroots movements, church     organizations and labor unions.

Finally, critical pedagogy needs to be a creative process by integrating elements of popular culture (i.e., drama, music, oral history, narratives) as educational tools that can successfully raise the level of political consciousness of students and teachers. (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005: 9). (17)

Radical Left Principles for Education Systems

It is important to develop schools and education systems with the following characteristics (18)
·    to level up education workers’ pay, rights and securities rather than level down to a lowest common denominator. This applies both within countries and globally.
·    to widen access to good quality education (by increasing its availability within countries and globally. Widening access to under-represented and under-achieving groups, can, with positive action and support, play a part in reducing educational inequalities between groups).
·    to secure vastly increased equality of educational outcomes.
·    to organise comprehensive provision (i.e. comprehensive, non-selective schooling with no private or selective or religiously exclusive provision of schooling).
·    to retain and enhance local and national democratic control over schooling and education democratic community control over education.
·    to use the local and national state to achieve an economically just (defined as egalitarian), anti-discriminatory society, rather than simply an inegalitarian meritocratic focus on equal opportunities to get to very unequal outcomes.
·    to recognise and seek to improve education systems that are dedicated to education for wider individual and social purposes than the production of hierarchicalised, ideologically quiescent and compliant workers and consumers in a neliberal/ liberalized world.

7. Arenas for Resistance

This is, as ever, subject to resistance and the balance of class forces (itself related to developing levels of class consciousness, political consciousness and political organisation and leadership). Resistance is possible, and will, inevitably grow. Demonstrations, strikes, anger, outrage at cuts, will increase, perhaps dramatically, in the coming period. To repeat, to be successful instead of inchoate, such anger and political activism needs to be focussed, and organised. In such circumstances, the forces of the Marxist Left in countries across the globe need to put aside decades old enmities, doctrinal, organisation and strategic disputes. As Hearse (2009) notes,

The left cannot adopt a spontaneist, wait and see attitude, hoping for a working class upsurge and the appearance by some magical process of a broad left alternative. Class politics, of the kind provided by Respect, aids the development of class consciousness and trade union struggle.

Of course, regroupment by itself just organises current activists and supporters. Regroupment needs to be followed by, accompanied by recruitment. At this particular moment in the crisis of capital accumulation and the actual and potential for loosening the chains of ideology/ false consciousness promulgated by knowledge workers in the (witting or unwitting) service of Capital.

Through well organised and focused non-sectarian campaigns organised around class and anti-capitalist issues (19), those committed to economic and social equality and justice and environmental sustainability can work towards local, national and international campaigns, towards an understanding that we are part of a massive force – the force of the international – and growing – (see Harman, 2002; Hill, 2003, Hearse, 2009) (20) working class – with a shared understanding that, at the current time, it is the global neo-liberal form of capitalism-  indeed, Capitalism itself –  that shatters the lives, bodies and dreams of billions.  And that it can be replaced.

NOTES

1. Wade notes that ‘the rate of profit of non-financial corporations fell steeply between 1950-73 and 2000-06 – in the US, by roughly a quarter. In response firms ‘invested’ increasingly in financial speculation (2008: 11)’.

2. Hearse (2009) continues,

The facts are astounding. Contrary to the delusions of the free-market fundamentalists, the Thatcher/Reagan revolution has come at a great cost to the working and middle classes. In the US, the top one per cent have seen a 78 per cent increase in their share of national income since 1979 with the bottom 80 per cent of the population experiencing a 15 per cent fall.

3. See Gillborn and Mirza, 2000; Hill, 2008 on (racialised and gendered) social class inequalities in income, wealth and educational attainment in England and Wales- and how much inequality has increased in Britain since 1979. See Harris, 2007, for a critique of the super-rich, ‘Richistan’ in the USA.

4. See, for example, Gillborn and Youdell, 2000; Hill, 2006a; Lewis, Hill and Fawcett, 2009.

5. See also Grieshaber-Otto and Sanger, 2002; Rikowski, 2001a, 2003; Hill and Kumar, 2009; Verger and Bonal, 2009; Devidal, 2009).

6. See, e.g. Levidow, 2002; Giroux, 2002, 2003.

7. See, for example, Hill, 2001, 2005b, 2007.

8. See Hill, 2005a; Hill and Boxley (2007) for a socialist programme for education policy

9. See Rikowski, e.g. 2001, and his website at http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=about&sub=Glenn%20Rikowski

10. See Cole and Hill, 2002; McLaren and Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, 2004, Kelsh and Hill, 2006a; Greaves, Hill and Maisuria, 2007; Hill, 2008.

11. For Marxist critiques of postmodernism in education, see, for example; Cole et al, 2001; Hill et al, 2002; Cole, 2004; 2008; Rikowski et al, 1997. For Marxist critiques of postmodern theory in general, see Callinicos, 1989; Eagleton, 1996.

12. See Althusser, 1971; Hill, 1989; 2001a, 2004, 2005b.

13. See: Hatcher, 2001; Hill 2001c, 2004a, b.

14. See Hill 2004, 2005a; Hill and Kumar, 2009; Schugurensky and Davidson-Harden, 2003, 2009.

15. For Left critiques of New Labour education policy in Britain, see Hill, 2006b, 2007; Jones, 2003; Tomlinson, 2004.

16. This must not be seen as an ad hominem/ personal attack on Michael W. Apple, the most influential of all radical left USA educational critics, in his analysis of the relationship between capitalism and education. See, for example, Apple, 2004. His attacks on classical Marxists, and revolutionary Marxism, are contained, for example, in Apple, 2005, 2006. But he is a left reformist. For critiques of his work, see Kelsh and Hill, 2006; Rikowski, 2006.

17. In Capitalists and Conquerors: a Critical pedagogy Against Empire (2005), McLaren develops this. See, also, McLaren, 2001, 2005; McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2001, 2005; Hill, 2009c.

18. See Hill, 2002b, Hillcole Group, 1991, 1997; Hill and Boxley, 2007).

19. Harman (2002) suggests that

what matters now is for this (new) generation (of activists) to connect with the great mass of ordinary workers who as well as suffering under the system have the collective strength to fight it (p.40)

Moody (2002) concurs- ‘By itself, and despite its ability to breach police lines, this ‘movement of movements’ lacks the social weight to carry out the very task it has set itself- the dismantling of the mechanisms of capitalist globalisation (p.293).

20. As Hearse (2009) notes,

Socialism is not inevitable but only the working class can develop the consciousness and organisation to bring it about. That certainty remains at the heart of socialist strategy and tactics.

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The Knowledge Industry in/of Education

Introduction: The Revisionist Left

The struggle over the end(s) of education has intensified as neo-liberal and neoconservative initiatives work systematically to reduce education to an adjunct serving the interests of the capitalist class in extracting ever more profit for itself.

As these initiatives increasingly displace education as an endeavor central to enabling both the free and full development of every individual and socially necessary societal development – development to meet the needs of people rather than the desires of the capitalist class for more profit for itself – it is urgently necessary to bring the Marxist concept of class back into educational theory, research, and practice. This is because it has the explanatory power to expose and analyze the structure of ownership and power in capitalist social relations. By capitalist social relations we mean the relations of exploitation between labor and capital that “condition,” in the sense of placing limits on, “the general process of social, political, and intellectual life” (Marx, 1859/1989, pp. 20-21). (1) Because it can expose and analyze these relations that are at the core of social inequity, the Marxist concept of class can enable development of knowledge capable of pointing to ways of restructuring society so that public needs take priority over private profit.

The Marxist concept of class, however, is marginalized and trivialized by the revisionist left discourses that are dominant in education as elsewhere. By “revisionist left,” we mean, following Rosa Luxemburg (1899/1970), those theorists who consider themselves to be “left” but who believe there is no alternative to capitalism, and thus do “not expect to see the contradictions of capitalism mature.” Their theories consequently aim “to lessen, to attenuate, the capitalist contradictions” – in short, to “adjust” “the antagonism between capital and labor.” As Luxemburg explained, the core aim of the revisionist left is the “bettering of the situation of the workers and. . . the conservation of the middle classes” (p. 60).

We support reforms and revisionist political and economic advances that seek to improve the lives of workers, for example, anti-capitalist as well as reformist campaigns and movements such as campaigns for tenants’ rights, gender equality, race equality, and campaigns against SATS or the privatization of schools. But, it is crucial to note, we do so from a critical position. We believe, along with Marx and Engels (1848/1985), that it is necessary to “fight for the attainment of the immediate aims. . . of the working class” (p. 119). For, as Marx argues, “by maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the processes of production, [the fight for the attainment of immediate aims] matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one” (Marx, 1867/1967a, p. 503; Marx explains this in chapters 8 & 9 of Wage-Labour and Capital, and chapter 15 of Capital volume 3).

Yet we also believe, again following Marx and Engels (1985), that it is necessary to “take up a critical position” in relation to reform movements, and to do so in order to educate the proletariat – that class comprised of all who do not own the means of production and are therefore compelled to sell their labor-power to survive – regarding “the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat” (p. 120). In doing so, we aim to provide knowledges that help enable (in relation to various sectional, local, and single-issue campaigns) the development of class consciousness – knowledge of capitalist social relations – and awareness of the need to transform capitalism into socialism.

In marginalizing and trivializing the Marxist concept of class, the revisionist left blocks critique of the practices of the capitalist class and their agents, and in turn, blocks the development of proletariat class consciousness. It gets rid of such “troublesome” concepts as “bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” “social class,” and “social totality.”By social totality we mean society as a systemic entity operating on fundamental and knowable laws of motion (contradictory relations that cause change in capitalism and constitute the basis for its transformation) that are capable of explaining the connections among apparently autonomous practices and sites.

By substituting for these explanatory concepts the notions of, for example, relative autonomy and multiple and contingent classes and determinations, the revisionist left posits the social as an unknowable field of infinitely proliferating differences, one without cause or end. By manufacturing and disseminating this theory of the social and versions of it, the revisionist left produces subjects who cannot explain, without “any mystification and speculation,” as Marx and Engels emphasize in The German Ideology, “the connection of the social and political structure with production” (1965/1989, pp. 46-47). (Many subjects – for example, Blair’s and Bush’s professional ideologues – do “explain” the social and political as they connect to production – but with all kinds of mystification and speculation!)

In producing such knowledges and subjects, the revisionist left engages in managerial practices that register a profound and capitalist-class interested resistance to allowing the class politics of knowledge production to surface within the practices of knowledge production. To be specific: by erasing the binary concept of class, the revisionist left manages, seeks to amend, the capital-labor antagonism in capitalism. At the same time, by substituting for the Marxist concept of class an understanding of class as an effect of culture that has no relation to production, the revisionist left erases its own implication in producing knowledge central to the management, or the smoothing over, of binary class antagonism. The revisionist left, that is, “resists” laying bare the ways in which knowledge production is connected to capitalist production, and in doing so it serves the interests of the capitalist class. It also thereby preserves itself.

Through a critique of sample representative revisionist left theorists in education, this essay aims to open space for the development of class consciousness through the praxis of historical materialist critique. By this, we mean the praxis based on the Marxist theory of class that produces knowledges which are transformative because they make intelligible and explain the cause(s) of inequity, the existing property relations of capitalism that constitute capitalism itself. Understanding the Marxist theory of class and the knowledge it enables, is necessary if one is serious about establishing a society based on the principle “from each according to . . . ability, to each according to. . . needs” (Marx, 1891/1938, p. 10).

Marx: Class, Production, and Class Consciousness

Over the last several decades, the revisionist left has systematically discredited and displaced the Marxist concept of class, understood as a relationship of ownership to private property (means of production) (Hill, 1999; Hill, 2006; Hill and Cole, 2001; Kelsh, 2001; Rikowski, 2001; Zavarzadeh, 1995). As the revisionist left now uses class, the term “social class” refers to social divisions, social strata, that are effects of market forces that are understood to be (relatively) autonomous from production practices, that is, from the social relations of capitalism that are the relations of exploitation between labor and capital.

However, the Marxist concept of class is deeply connected to the social relations of capitalism, the relations of exploitation between labor and capital that constitute the production practices of capitalism, and they are connected to them through the concept of property. Property, as Marx and Engels argued in The Communist Manifesto (1848/1967), is central to the concept of capital itself, and through this centrality, to production (p. 120). Under capitalism, property itself is what the worker does not have: “The proletarian is without property” (1848/1967, p. 92). As Marx explains extensively in Grundrisse (1858/1993, pp. 491-512; see also Capitalvolume I [1867/1967a] chapter 32), the inaugural moments of capitalism and its on-going development involve the “divorce between labour and property, between labour and the objective conditions of labour, everywhere” (p. 512). In Capital (1867/1967a), he argues that “The separation of labour from its product, of subjective labour-power from the objective conditions of labour, was therefore the real foundation in fact, and the starting-point of capitalist production” (p. 570).

For Marx, property involves not simply anything one possesses, but “the objective conditions of labour,” “the means of labour” – “land and soil, raw material, necessaries of life, instruments of labour, money or all of these” (1858/1993, p. 503). The objective conditions of labor are “all such objects as are necessary for carrying on the labour-process.” They include the “instruments of labour” (Marx, 1867/1967a, p. 180), and “an instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conductor of his activity” (Marx, 1867/1967a, p. 179).

The objective conditions of labor, however, are not property, but mere possessions, becoming property only under certain, historically produced conditions where workers have no such objective conditions of labor, and are employed to use the objective conditions of labor owned by others. Those historically produced conditions are ones referred to earlier: the workers have been “divorced” from the objective conditions of labor. This makes them “free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, etc., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own” (Marx, 1867/1967a, p. 714).

It is only when the possessor of the objective conditions of labor uses those conditions to exploit the “free” laborer for the production of surplus value that the objective conditions of labor constitute the understanding of property central to the Marxist concept of class. This is why Marx refers to the relations of production as “property relations” (e.g., 1859/1970, p. 21). Accordingly, Marx and Engels argue in The German Ideololgythat “Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the produce of the activity” (1965/1989, p. 53).

“Possessions,” then, constitute “property” only when they are used to exploit for production of surplus value. It is because classical Marxism understands the concept of property in this way that it also understands there to be only two classes fundamental to capitalism, and why it understands both of them to be constituted at the level of production, and not at the levels of culture or politics.

Marx calls the relations between the two classes “property relations” or “relations of production,” and he argues that it is these relations that provide the key to social analysis: “it is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production [i.e., the “means of production” – factories, agri-business, banks, finance houses, transport and communications industries] to the direct producers – a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labor and thereby its social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state” (1894/1967c, p. 791). The “hidden basis” of the social structure, in other words, is the relation between the two classes corresponding to a given state in the development of the productive forces, which include the means of production and labor-power. “Capital” itself, then, and as Marx argues, “is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation” (1894/1967, p. 814).

Surplus value – profit – is the value produced by worker expenditure of labor-power on the means of production. It is the value determined, ultimately by capitalist class practices in their totality, to be above and beyond (“surplus”) the value that the owner must pay in wages to the laborer to ensure she is able to reproduce her labor-power (Capital vol. 1 Part III, Chapter 7). “To extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest possible extent,” Marx argues, is “the directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production” (1867/1967a, p. 331). Marx calls the extraction of surplus-value from the worker “exploitation” because the capitalist uses the “freeness” of the worker for his own ends, production of profit.

Surplus-value arises out of the work done during that portion of the working-day Marx calls “surplus labour-time” because it is beyond that which the laborer must have to sustain himself. The labor completed during this part of the working day Marx calls “surplus-labour” which, he emphasizes, is crucial to understanding surplus-value. Surplus-value is “materialised surplus-labour” (1867/1967a, p. 217), and “is [the capitalist’s] property; it has never belonged to anyone else” (1867/1967a, p. 586). Profit, in other words, is labor-power for which the laborer is not compensated.

Marx calls the production (property) relations – the relations of class – “antagonistic.” The relations are “antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals” (Marx, 1859/1970, p. 21). Property relations are antagonistic because it is the labor-power of the workers that constitutes the very capital that is turned against the workers in the form of a power that leaves them no choice but to sell their labor-power again and again. “Property,” as Marx explains, is “the worker’s own objective conditions” that “arise over against him as autonomous forces, the property of someone else, value existing for itself and bringing everything back to itself – in short, capital” (Marx, 1995, p. 385). This “capital,” Marx argues, is “value concentrated into a power” (Marx, 1995, p. 385), and it consists of the very labor-power of the workers “embezzled” from them, “because abstracted without return of an equivalent” (Marx, 1867/1967a, p. 611).

Class, conceptualized in the Marxist framework as a binary social division instituted at the point of production and fundamental to capitalist production, is therefore capable of explaining the cause(s) of inequity and difference at the level of production that “condition. . . the general process of social, political and intellectual life” (Marx 1859/1989, pp. 20-21). Through historical materialist critique, the Marxist concept of class enables the development of reliable knowledge necessary to guide transformative social action.

Historical materialist critique grasps the “laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society” (Engels, 1975, p. 170). In order to do so, it systematically and ruthlessly penetrates through the connections imagined and made at the level of culture and the market, laying bare all as rooted in the social relations of production. In this way, it enables class consciousness: consciousness of the property relations in which are forged all “differences” (values), consciousness which involves the knowledge that if inequity in any arena of the social is to be abolished, what must be abolished are the property relations which are the cause of all inequity. Abolishing property relations – abolishing class – involves the dialectical move whereby workers take back the means of production “embezzled” from them by the capitalist class.

In the place of the Marxist theory of class, the revisionist left has installed a Weberian-derived notion of class as a tool of classification useful only to describe strata of people, as they appear at the level of culture and in terms of status derived from various possessions, economic, political, or cultural. Use of such classifications can be useful in exposing differentials. But for what purpose is such exposure useful? That is, who benefits from it?

Such differentials, because they are not understood from the vantage point of a binary concept of class, are used to fracture the working class by promoting anger, envy, guilt and blame among its various fractions. What is masked from workers, because the capitalist class and its agents work to augment ideology in place of knowledge, is that some workers are poor not because other workers are wealthy, but because the capitalist class exploits all workers, and then divides and hierarchizes them, according capitalist class needs for extracting ever more surplus value (profit). However, as a tool of categorization, such a concept of class cannot provide reliable knowledge to guide transformative praxis. It can provide indications and motivations for reformist measures, such as social democratic redistributive expenditure and policy programmes, but these are limited in nature. Ultimately, as we explain, such Weberian-derived classifications serve to occlude class consciousness and the class contradiction within Capital.

The revisionist left and the right, in other words, understand class not as an historically-produced, objective and antagonistic relation rooted in the relations of production in which people engage in order to produce their material life, but as an effect of cultural practices in relation to which individuals engage in an on-going process of identity formation.

For example, class in Paul Fussell’s book Class, is understood in terms of what one buys, how one decorates one’s house, and how one speaks. “According to these views,” as Zavarzadeh (1995) explains, “the effective site of social change. . . is not ‘class’ but the incommensurate consuming ‘identities’ obtained in what Angela McRobbie calls the ‘social relations of shopping’ (34)” (p. 45). In this scenario, Zavarzadeh continues, “the proletariat is no longer the revolutionary vanguard but a ‘shopper,’ who daringly consumes objects such as cashmere sweaters forbidden for his consumption by the binary representation of bourgeois/ proletariat” (p. 46). But, he points out, “what separates people is not ownership of consumption items, but ownership of the means of production. The person who pays by food stamp and the worker who pays by his paycheck are in the same class of people: those who do not have access (not to the means of consumption) but to the means of production” (p. 44).

In such a framework, the actual material practices in which people engage to produce their material life are believed to have no bearing on consciousness. That is, the exploitative social relations of production in which all persons engage in order to provide themselves with food, clothing, shelter, education, and so forth, are thought to have no impact on the ideas people have. But as Marx and Engels (1969/1985) explain, “Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process” (p. 47). With few exceptions, the revisionist left and the right concur that the market represents the consciousness of people, and that it is this consciousness that determines people’s existence, and therefore all that is necessary to do in order to change the world is to change people’s consciousness. The revisionist left, that is, now rejects what the right rejects, that “social existence . . . determines . . . consciousness,” and affirms the idealism that informs the right: that “consciousness. . . determines . . . existence” (Marx, 1989, p. 21).

As a consequence of the culturalization of class, the concept of false consciousness – by which we mean a consciousness arising from the attempt to “explain practice from the idea” (“class” as an effect of the market as “people’s will”) rather than explaining “the formation of ideas from material practice” (“people’s will” as effect of class; Marx & Engels, 1965/1989, p. 58) – has been abandoned. So, too, has the concept of class consciousness, which involves developing the knowledge to explain how and why one’s experiences as a proletariat (class) subject are shaped by material practice. Class consciousness, that is, involves knowledge of class as the relations of production. Insofar as the revisionist left has discarded this (binary) concept of class, it contributes to the blocking of class consciousness.

Weber: Class, the Cultural “Market,” and False Consciousness

For both Weber and Marx, class determination involves property. However, each understands property in radically different terms. The two understandings of property not only generate different types and numbers of classes. They also open fundamentally opposing horizons of possibility for knowledge of “difference” and action based on that knowledge.

As we have argued, the concept of property is central to the classical Marxist concept of class. In the Marxist theory of class, through exploitation enabled by property ownership, owners live off the labor-power of workers: owners’ source of income is not wages but profit, the expropriated labor-power of others. In the form of property understood as the means of production, owners possess the power both to command those who do not own, not only to labor, but also to agree to be unpaid for a portion of what they produce through their labor, and the power that they have to do so is material: it is the expropriated labor-power of the workers themselves.

In contrast to Marx’s theory of class, Weber’s does not involve one’s relation to private property understood as capital. It is the case that Weber asserts that “‘property’ and ‘lack of property’ are. . . the basic categories of all class situations” (1914/1968, p. 927). This is a division that makes Weber’s theory of class appear to be able to explain the cultural in relation to the “economic,” and to involve property and labor in doing so. It is what allows “classical” Weberian theory and current reconstructions of it (whether they claim to be Weberian or not) to represent themselves as capable of explaining power and inequity in relation to the social relations of production, when in fact they occlude property relations and the exploitation they entail.

Indeed, Weberian-based understandings of the social, such as that used by prominent educational theorist Michael W. Apple, have the appearance of the “radical” because they use terms such as “class” and “the economic,” and claim to be making arguments for social change that involve the “transformation” of capitalism.

Yet, they are revisionist, not “radical,” because such theories of the social do not grasp things by the root, which is the meaning of “radical.” In effect if not by design, Weberian-based formulations of class serve the interests of the capitalist class (this explains their prominence) insofar as they erase both the proletariat and the capitalist classes as antagonistic entities unified in the contradictory and exploitative social (property) relations of capitalist production. They thereby make invisible the root social (property) relation of capitalism so that it is not possible to question it in order to produce knowledge to change it.

Apple claims to be “deeply committed to social transformation” (2003, p. 17), but the “transformation” he speaks of is problematic. First, in actuality, it is quite limited. Second, it is, at the same time, a fantasy. He does not want to abolish the capitalist regime of wage-labour involving exploitation. He wants, for example, to “eliminate poverty through greater income parity” (2006, p. 68). Indeed, he argues not for transformation, but for a “politics of interruption” (2005, p. 392). This is a limited aim insofar as it leaves exploitation in place, capitalism unchallenged, and the repressive political and state forms of capital in control. It is also a fantasy because as Marx argued and as the world has seen, under capitalism, “accumulation of wealth at one pole is . . . accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital” (Marx, 1867/1967a, p. 645). Empirical data (e.g., Dumenil and Levy, 2004; Harvey, 2005; Hill, 2006) shows only too nakedly the increasing national and global inequalities of wealth and the growth of poverty. Greater income parity under Capital is an illusory fantasy, other than for particular strata of the working class.

Apple’s understanding of class borrows a great deal from Weber. In order to explain this, it is necessary to unpack the Weberian understanding of class.

In opposition to Marx, Weber does not regard the “propertied” and “nonpropertied” as classes. These are only what he calls the “basic categories of all class situations.” And by “property,” Weber means something very different from Marx’s theorization of that concept. Moreover, for Weber, it is “‘class situation'”, which he equates with “‘market situation'”, that is the basis for “class.”

“‘Class situation,'” writes Weber, “means the typical probability of 1. procuring goods, 2. gaining a position in life and 3. finding inner satisfactions, a probability which derives from the relative control over goods and skills and from their income-producing uses within a given economic order” (1914/1968, p. 302). “‘Class’,” for Weber, “means all persons in the same class situation” (p. 302). “‘Class situation’ and ‘class’,” Weber summarizes, “refer only to the same (or similar) interests which an individual shares with others” (p. 302). “Always,” Weber argues, “this is the generic connotation of the concept of class: that the kind of chance in the market is the decisive moment which presents a common condition for the individual’s fate” (p. 928). Thus, Weber notes that “‘class situation’ is, in this sense, ultimately ‘market situation'” (p. 928).

Weber substitutes market situation for the classical Marxist “position in the social relations of production” as that which determines class. For Weber the market is the arena where people meet “competitively . . . for the purpose of exchange” (1914/1968, p. 927) of “any object” “for money” (p. 82). They bring to the market a great variety of things. Those whom Weber would classify as members of “property classes” (p. 302) bring to the market “property” understood as that which is “usable for returns” (p. 928).

This is in contrast to Marx, who theorizes “property” as the means of production created by labor-power but appropriated by the capitalist class, who then uses those means to command labor-power to produce surplus value for the capitalist class. However, Weber pluralizes property to mean any sort of possession, “large or small” (1914/1968, p. 928), for which one could receive a “return.” Those whom Weber would classify as members of “commercial classes” bring to the market “services . . . differentiated just as much according to their kinds of services as according to the way in which they make use of these services, in a continuous or discontinuous relation to a recipient” (p. 928). While they are “typically entrepreneurs,” these classes also include bankers, lawyers, physicians, artists, and “workers with monopolistic qualifications and skills . . . natural, or acquired” (p. 304).

In place of Marx’s understanding of labor-power as a commodity that is a source of value, and a source of “more value than it has itself” (1867/1967a, p. 193), Weber substitutes services and skills that come in an infinite number of forms. In the Weberian framework, there are also “negatively privileged” property and commercial classes, which include the “unfree” and “‘paupers'” in the former, and skilled to unskilled laborers in the latter. And, “In between are the various ‘middle classes,'” some of whom are in commercial classes, but some of whom fall outside all categories, for example, peasants and officials (1914/1968, pp. 303-304).

Weber’s pluralization of property into goods and skills generates a great many “property classes” and “commercial classes,” each including positively and negatively privileged subsets. Weber merges the differentially based property and commercial classes into what he calls “social classes.” These social classes are those generally used by researchers: “a) the working class as a whole. . . b) the petty bourgeoisie, c) the propertyless intelligentsia and specialists. . . d) the classes privileged through property and education” (1914/1968, p. 305). Each social class “makes up the totality of those class situations within which individual and generational mobility is easy and typical” (p. 302). This does not mean that one can move among the social classes with ease. It means, rather, that Weber identifies “four major social classes” among which “social mobility is infrequent and difficult but within which it is relatively common” (Breen, 2001, p. 41; emphasis added).

Thus, “social class” in Weber is not an explanatory concept but a tool of classification used to manage the many different classes for purposes of description according to typical “life chances” as determined by “market situation.”

Because it is “the kind of chance in the market [that] is the decisive moment which presents a common condition for the individual’s fate” (1914/1968, p. 928) – in other words, because “‘class situation’ is . . . ‘market situation'” (p. 928) – and because for Weber, the market is the space of “battle of man against man” (p. 93) in competitive exchange, classes are not in the Weberian framework constituted in production by relations of exploitation, but by relations at the level of culture among individuals. To Weber’s thinking, class is not a matter of one’s position in relation to private property understood as the means of production, which determines as Marx sees it whether one arrives on the market compelled to sell labor-power or capable of buying and exploiting it. Rather, class for Weber is an effect of the specific goods and skills people manage to exchange on the market.

Class conceptualized no further than produced at the level of the market, as Weber conceptualizes it, is only ever reformist because it is a theory of the social that manufactures subjects who perceive of themselves as individuals and act on the basis of individual (subjective) interests which, it must be emphasized, are constituted as such by the terms of the market.

Class understood as produced at the level of the market contributes to false consciousness. In order to unpack this, it is necessary to state what we mean by false consciousness, and to do this, we need to explain the Marxist concept of ideology.

By ideology, we mean the discourse that attempts to make sense of and develop a coherent way of understanding social existence by covering over the real contradictions under capitalism and re-presenting them, at the level of ideas, such that they have some descriptive value of a circumstance for the individual (Ebert, 1996, p. 8). Ideology is in essence false consciousness, an inverted understanding of cause and effect that itself arises from the inversions of capitalism involved in the contradiction between the forces and relations of production at capitalism’s core: “the real barrier of capitalist production,” Marx argues, “is capital itself. . . . The means – unconditional development of the productive forces of society – comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital” (1894/1967c, p. 250). This “limited purpose” – production to increase the capital of those who own property rather than to meet the needs of all persons – is an “inversion” in the sense that it is the opposite of what is possible once the productive forces under capitalism have reached such a high level of development: production to meet the needs of all. (2) The ideology of “merit,” to take one example, serves to mask this real, material contradiction, at the same time as it enables individuals to attempt to make sense of why some people have and others do not.

As Marx explains with reference to the domination of living labor by capital, “this inverted relationship necessarily produces certain correspondingly inverted conceptions, a transposed consciousness which is further developed by the metamorphoses and modifications of the actual circulation process” (1894/1967c, p. 45). Marx opens Capital with a critique of an “inverted conception” arising from an “inverted relationship” involving capitalist contradiction through his analysis of the commodity. Through the social relations of production, he explains, commodities are presented to persons not as relations among persons buying and selling labor-power but between products; they are presented, in other words, as the inverse of what they actually are: “the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour” (1867/1967a, p. 72).

The “inverted conceptions” are ideological understandings which, as Jorge Larrain (1996) argues in a critique of Stuart Hall’s various and limited conceptions of ideology, are “not the result of a conspiracy of the ruling class to deceive the dominated classes, nor. . . arbitrary invention{s) of consciousness.” They are, rather, “spontaneous or elaborated discursive attempt[s] to deal with forms of oppression and contradictions which [are] unable to ascertain the true origin of these problems and therefore result. . . in the masking and reproduction of those very contradictions and forms of oppression” (p. 55).

Attempts to resolve in the theoretical imaginary those contradictions that have their basis in practice and cannot actually be eradicated until capitalism is transformed into communism result in what we are calling false consciousness. It is a “consciousness” that is cut off from the historical materialist theorization of production as determinate. In other words, it is cut off from the understanding of labor-power as the source of all power and therefore denies that historical agency – the agency that can transform a mode of production into another and with it the culture that is the expression of the mode of production – is always an issue of class and not any individual.

For the class conscious agency of the proletariat, whose basis for agency as a class is in fact its labor-power that becomes concentrated in the means of production, false consciousness substitutes (in this example) the agency of the individual or group on the labor market. In other words, the proletariat sees its agency only in terms of individual or group agency, and only in terms of what any individual or group can accomplish in the labor market. In contrast, the class conscious proletariat recognizes that its agency goes well beyond market agency, in fact, to abolishing the market as the place for the sale and purchase of labor-power. The limited “agency” of the market – a “market risk agency” – can only be one which results, through risks taken in relation to the labor market, in the securing of “more or less” resources at the level of the individual or group, rather than transformation of capitalism into socialism where the needs of the many take priority over profit for the few. It is because false consciousness, contained as it is to the level of the market and culture in general, is reformist, that any (re)articulation undertaken at that level (the market), without going beyond that level, in a dialectical move, to its own condition of possibility in production, is also reformist.

Class in the Field of Education: The Culturalization of Class and the example of Michael W. Apple (3)

Class for Apple is similarly an effect of the operations of the market. Apple notes that “markets provide [public institutions involving goods such as education and universal health care] in radically unequal ways, with class, gender, and especially race being extremely powerful markers of these inequalities” (2006, pp. 103-104; 2005, p. 386). For Apple, class, along with gender and race, are effects, “markers” of the inequitable operations of the market, as opposed to constituted in the relations of exploitation.

This is particularly clear in his use of the work of Basil Bernstein, for whom class is cultural, a formulation about which Apple notes that “I do not want to imply that this is necessarily wrong” (Apple, 1992, p. 135). Drawing on Bernstein’s work, Apple substitutes “class formation” – by which he means, following Wright, “‘organized collectivities'” or “groups” that have some level of class consciousness about themselves as a class (1992, pp. 136-137) – for class as “a set of relations that have an existence outside of our minds,” by which he means the Marxist concept of class (1992, p.130).

In other words, as Farahmandpur (2004) notes, “Apple conflates class with class consciousness. In contrast to class that stands out as an objective force, which is largely determined by an individual’s position within the social relations of production, class consciousness is socially constructed by an individual’s race, gender, and culture.”

About these “class formations,” Apple notes that they are formed by “labor market segmentation, unionization, party formation, legal and governmental practices, the development of social movements, the historical relationship among class, race, and gender antagonisms, alliances, and struggles, and so forth” (1992, p. 137). In short, he repeatedly cautions against forgetting class as central to capitalism as a “massive structuring force” (1992, p. 130; see also, for example, 1993, p. 177). Yet class for Apple is nevertheless, in his actual practices, an effect of the market, determined not by relation to property, but by relations within culture.

That class for Apple is an effect of the market is also abundantly evident in his use of Weberian terminology. An examination of a range of Apple’s texts reveals that throughout, he discusses class in descriptive, Weberian terms: “middle-class”; “working-class”; “skilled workers” (1986); “working-class”; “lower-middle-class”; “new middle class” (1993); “managerial and professional middle class”; “poor and working-class” (2006). When he uses the term “socioeconomic status (SES)” – as when he writes that “Rather than giving large numbers of students who are working class, poor, or of color the ability to exit, it is largely higher SES families who exit from public schools and schools with mixed populations” (2006, p. 66) – he quietly acknowledges that his use of “class” is merely descriptive. In fact, at the 2005 AERA convention in Montreal, Apple explicitly rejected the binary understanding of class informing all of Marx’s works, stating that “that doesn’t work anymore” (Kelsh & Hill, notes, April 14, 2005).

In using a Weberian theory of class, Apple works, in effect if not in intent, against the interests of the proletariat by blocking its ability to see itself as a class, and furthermore, as a class in relation to the capitalist class. Weberian theory closes all space to conceptualize the proletariat as a class. The proletariat simply does not exist in Weberian class theory. This is not to say there are no workers in Weberian theory. It is to say that in the Weberian understanding of class all workers do not constitute a class – and neither do all property owners. It is telling that Apple does not use terms such as “proletariat,” which would include all of the SES classes he uses, nor do we see him use the concept of the capitalist class. Instead, Apple substitutes terms such as “dominant groups and classes” (1982, p. 29), and “dominant economic elites” (2006, p. 30).

Such Weberian-derived classifications have a number of impacts. First, they hide the capitalist class. For example, in the UK, the Registrar-General’s / Office of Population Census and Statistics official categorisations of social class in the UK are as follows: the highest status class, “Class 1,” the “Higher Managerial and Professional Class,” includes “employers of more than 25 staff, and senior managers (e.g., plumber, carpenter, dressmaker who employs more than 25).” The “Higher professional” group includes “doctors, dentists, lawyers, university teachers.” Together these account for 11% of the British population. There is no separate category of capitalists, the owners of the means of production. They are lumped together with “higher professional” workers (Office, 2000).

Second, Weberian-derived classifications segment the commonality and objective unity of the working class. These distinctions of layer, or strata, serve to politically fragment the working class and its sense of solidarity, of social and political cohesion. It also presents a picture of a fragmented working class with divergent interests. Classification substituted for class thus works to fragment working class solidarity, class consciousness, a class-based political project aimed at replacing capitalism by socialism, and a political organisation aimed at achieving that project. For if there is not an objective working class, Marx’s historical materialist analysis of society is erroneous, and the working class no longer would have its historic mission to bury and replace capitalism with socialism.

Weber was, and still is, a very effective professional ideologue for the capitalist class. And, in effect if not in intent, so is Apple. By effectively disappearing, hiding, disguising, the exploitation of all those who do not own the means of production by those who do, he serves to block the development of the connection between culture and production practices. He therefore, again, in effect if not in intent, blocks the development of class consciousness. The apparent differentiation of the proletariat at the level of culture is the effect of the mediation of labor-power that has a material basis in the divorce of labor from capital (property) in capitalism. But Apple erases that material basis, making “differences” appear to be free-floating, severed from material cause.

Apple’s use of class as a descriptive term of classification does not and cannot capture relations, including therelations of production, property relations. That Apple uses a framework that cannot capture relations contradicts an important argument he himself has consistently put forth at least since 1979 (Ideology and Curriculum). He argues that “in opposition to the atomistic assumptions that predominate in our commonsense thought,” it is necessary to see things “‘relationally’. . . . First, any subject matter under investigation must be seen in relation to its historical roots – how it evolved, from what conditions it arose, etc. – and its latent contradictions and tendencies in the future. . . . Second, anything being examined is defined not only by its obvious characteristics, but by its less overt ties to other factors. It is these ties or relationships that make the subject what it is and give it its primary meanings” (1979, p. 132). The theory of class used by Apple contradicts both of the principles he puts forth here regarding the use of critical theory “used critically” (1979, p. 130, original emphasis).

Apple contradicts himself on his first principle by using a theory of class that severs class from its root material cause in the property relations of capitalism. In Apple’s understanding of class, differences are not determined by position in the social relations of production, but are determined by culture through its operations on and in the market. This is cultural reductionism.

Apple repeatedly rejects “both the class and economic reductionism of the left” (1986, p. 198; see also 2006, p. 30). He does so ostensibly because he opposes the presumably one-sided analyses that it produces, as he indicates when he argues that the cultural and the economic “must be integrated to fully explain the roles schools play in the cultural and economic reproduction of class relations” (1979, p. 130). However, we see in his practice of cultural reductionism that he does not oppose “reduction” itself, but rather only the reduction that aims to enable the development of revolutionary class consciousness. This reveals the capitalist-class interestedness of his practices.

Apple contradicts himself on his second principle because in the merely descriptive and cultural understanding of class that he advances, the fact that one person “has” and others “have not” are causally unrelated “[market] situations.” In the Weberian understanding of class that Apple uses, there is no fundamental relation between the fact that Bill Gates has a billion dollars while those who produce microchips for Microsoft have only enough income on which to survive. What is hidden from view in Apple’s own uncritical use of critical theory is that Bill Gates is a billionaire because so many workers are exploited.

Apple, like Weber, displaces property and labor-power from production into culture, pluralizing and dehistoricizing both, and severing class from production. This makes class membership unstable, shifting, and fundamentally unknowable, and simultaneously cuts the oppositional and antagonistic relation between classes in Marxist theory. It is because of the different determinants of class situation – property, skill, or a combination of both – that any Weberian-based theory of class is said to be “multidimensional.” It is precisely this “multidimensionality” that occludes the clear conceptualization of the binary class division of society, the grasping of the dialectical laws of motion of which not only explains why proletariat revolution is both possible and necessary but also enables the production of the reliable knowledge – knowledge rooted in the material practices of people rather than their ideas about themselves – which provides the basis for the principled politics necessary to engage in revolutionary praxis in order to replace capitalism with socialism.

Pluralization of property in Weber could be infinite, and infinitely open to revision, and so, too, could the number of property and commercial classes included in the categories of social classes. It is this (Weberian) framework, where property is pluralized and displaced onto culture, that manufactures “class” as a concept that is regarded to be – and in its Weberian manifestations actually is – “murky” (Lubienski, 2003, p. 32; Nealon & Giroux, 2003, p. 180). However, class is reproduced as “murky” by the practices of researchers, theorists, and educators who promulgate a Weberian-based theory of class. These are – in effect if not by design – capitalist-class interested practices because in blocking access to knowledges that enable class consciousness, they enable the reproduction of a system that privileges profit over the needs of people.

In Apple’s Weberian-based understanding of class, the ambiguity regarding the basis of any class situation erases the objective fact that all those who “freely” agree to subject themselves to the “chances” they might have on the market are in reality compelled to do so by the power of the bourgeoisie. This power consists, it is necessary to repeat, on the bourgeoisie’s private ownership of the means of production, or, to put it another way, on the theft of labor-power of the proletariat.

By disappearing into the “market situation” the category of being compelled to sell labor-power, Apple’s works disappear having to sell labor-power as that which articulates the proletariat as a single class, no matter how highly differentiated workers appear to be on the market, or how many classes or social movements are articulated into a coalition at the level of culture. Disappearing the category of being compelled to sell labor-power removes from the theoretical imaginary the basis for the possibility and necessity of an international proletarian movement.

Above all, the power of the proletariat to abolish class society, which resides in the fact that the proletariat is the class of producers, is hidden and replaced by power understood as “the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action” (1914/1968, p. 926). In Weberian theory, power is not determined by the social relations of production; power is not the materiality of proletariat labor-power turned against the class from which it was appropriated by the bourgeoisie. Class and power are understood, rather, as the outcome of cultural practices. From within the terms of Weberian theory, it is not possible to question the regime of wage-labor in order to produce knowledge to change it.

Race, Class, and Gender: The Triptych Theory of the Social

Apple repeatedly argues that oppositions in culture – such as those involving race and gender – cannot be “reduced to the automatic workings out of simple formulas. We need a much more nuanced and complex picture of class relations and class projects to understand what is happening” in relation to “racial dynamics” as well as those involving gender (2006, p. 116; 2005, p. 392). In this, Apple presupposes that the Marxist theory of class cannot address differences such as those of race and gender – essentially, that it can address only the “economic.” Here, Apple misrepresents Marxism as a theory that, in the words of Stuart Hall whose work Apple draws on, “did not talk about or seem to understand . . . culture, ideology, language, the symbolic” (Hall, 1992, p. 279). But Marxism does, and it did, as Engels makes clear:

According to the materialist conception of history the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its consequences, constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc. – forms of law – and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants: political, legal, philosophical theories, religious ideas and their further development into systems of dogma – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements, in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (i.e., of things and events whose inner connection is so remote or so impossible to prove that we regard it as absent and can neglect it), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. (Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch [1890]; in Selsam & Martel, 1987, pp. 205-206)

Apple valorizes those who “see that capitalism is not only an economic system but a cultural system as well” (1992, p. 128). Such a valorization, however, is simply symptomatic of Apple’s collapse of the “economic” as the ultimately determining element into the “economic” as the only determining element, a formulation that Engels refutes. Yet, in Apple’s framework, it is necessary to collapse these two in order to manufacture and disseminate a vulgar form of Marxism against which Apple can launch his own formulations.

Having distorted classical Marxist theory, Apple argues for a “relative autonomy” model of the social, in which “cultural forms and practices . . . have their own politics” that, while “related to and limited by class relations and the economy,” “have something of a life of their own and provide important grounding for action that may not simply reproduce existing relations of domination and exploitation” (1986, p. 22). In this theory of the social – in which class, it is necessary to recall, has actually been made a cultural form and severed from class at the level of production – there are, in Apple’s most recent formulation, “a multitude of intersecting and contradictory dynamics including not only class but race and gender as well” (2006, p. 67). We refer to this as a “triptych” formulation, following McLaren and Scatamburlo d’Annibale’s (2004) critique of this forumation:

Race, class and gender, while they invariably intersect and interact, are not co-primary. This “triplet” approximates what the “philosophers might call a category mistake.” On the surface the triplet may be convincing – some people are oppressed because of their race, others as a result of their gender, yet others because of their class – but this “is grossly misleading” for it is not that “some individuals manifest certain characteristics known as ‘class’ which then results in their oppression; on the contrary, to be a member of a social class just is to be oppressed” and in this regard class is “a wholly social category” (Eagleton, 1998,p. 289). Furthermore, even though “class” is usually invoked as part of the aforementioned and much vaunted triptych, it is usually gutted of its practical, social dimension or treated solely as a cultural phenomenon – as just another form of “difference.” In these instances, class is transformed from an economic and, indeed, social category to an exclusively cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a “subject position.” (p. 186)

But, what is this “life of their own” that Apple claims the politics of cultural forms and practices have, and where does it come from? As we will argue, this “life” privileges experiential knowledge over theoretical knowledge, and in particular, classical Marxist theory.

Apple articulates his overriding program as follows:

the problem is not only how we might fruitfully examine both class and gender together, but also how we combine structuralist insights about the relationship between the school and the social and sexual division of labor with a culturalist perspective that places human agency and the concrete experiences of people at the center. (1986, p. 23)

While Apple (1982) believes that local analyses need to be set “within a larger framework of class and ideological and material forces, forces that set limits on, and actually help produce, the meanings and practices one finds,” he also believes that what makes any work “significant to an investigation of schooling and reproduction is the clearly articulated focus on class not as an abstract category but instead as a lived experience” (p. 117). The politics of cultural forms and practices, then, are grounded in experience, which Apple frames as containing a “truth” beyond the explanatory reach of class as relation to property in a system of production.

What this does, however, is posit experience, as Young (2006) has argued in a critique of Patricia Hill Collins’ work, as “the limit text of the real” (p. 2). Young explains why this is problematic:

experience is a highly mediated frame of understanding. Though it is true that a person of color experiences oppression, this experience is not self-explanatory and, therefore, it needs to be situated in relation to other social practices. Experience seems local but it is, like all cultural and political practices, interrelated to other practices and experiences. Thus its explanation come from its “outside.” Theory, specifically Marxist theory, provides an explanation of this outside by reading the meaning of all experiences as determined by the economic realities of class. (p. 2)

Similarly, Gimenez (2001) has argued that while experience is “illuminating” because it gives us access to “how people describe their understanding of their lives,”

Experience in itself, however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is, at the same time, unique, personal, insightful and revealing and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about. (p. 30)

In other words, experience is not the limit text of the truth, because it is a description, and “description. . . no matter how thorough, has meaning only within a specific theoretical context” (Gimenez, 2001, p. 29). And the theories that people have to understand experience, even to frame the description of experience, are heavily mediated by the interests of the capitalist class, which privileges those theories that accord with its aim: more profit for itself. In other words, theory that is “out there” to use to frame or explain experience isput “out there” by the capitalist class.

Apple knows this. He himself writes that “Grasping what [current developments in the marketization of the world] means is made harder in daily life for all of us because of the dominant forms of interpretation that are now made available or not made easily available in education and in the media” (2006, p. 16).

What Apple wants to get at by examining experience is “possibilities that exist for altering dominant relations” (1986, p. 24). However, this is a limited program. It can only result in small changes at local sites, changes that, because they take place within the framework of capitalism, can succeed only in securing gains that (a) take away from the resources of another group at another site, given the limited resources the capitalist class allots to and divides among the proletariat; or (b) can easily be taken away in another local struggle where the group who serves the interests of the capitalist class are advantaged in some way or another. Moreover, it conveniently forgets that these “possibilities” are likely those formulated out of theories that the capitalist class has put out there. Still, Apple valorizes the experiential and in doing so, serves the interests of the capitalist class.

Apple’s triptych formulation aligns with that of Anderson and Collins’ (1998) formulation of the “matrix of domination” that understands “race, class, and gender as different but interrelated axes of social structure” (p. 3). In this widely accepted and used framework, race, class, and gender are understood as “interlocking categories of experience that affect all aspects of human life; thus, they simultaneously structure the experiences of all people in this society. At any moment, race, class, or gender may feel more salient or meaningful in a given person’s life, but they are overlapping and cumulative in their effect on people’s experience” (p. 3).

Gimenez (2001) refers to this as the theory of intersectionality: “an account of the multiplicity of locations effecting individuals [sic] experiences, or as a study of the patterned variations in the identities individuals claim for themselves regardless of those locations.” She critiques it because it “cannot explain either the sources of inequalities or their reproduction over time” (p. 29). Insofar as Apple posits a triptych formulation, his framework has the same limit.

Furthermore, though, the triptych framework undermines itself. As Young argues in his critique of Collins,

If race, class, gender, and the accompanying ideological apparatuses are interlocking systems of oppression, as Collins suggests, then the experiential is not the site for the “true” but rather the site for the articulation of dominant ideology. On what basis, then, could the experiential provide grounds for an historical understanding of the structures that make experience itself possible as experience? (2006, p. 2)

The triptych framework Apple currently uses, in which “it is from the experience of attempting to create a new, more democratic politics of school life that we can learn what is possible” (1993, p. 41), ignores that such experiences are ideological in the sense, as explained above, that ideology involves an attempt to make sense of cultural contradictions rooted in the relations of exploitation by covering them over and re-narrating them in terms of some “differences” that, while the differences appear at the level of culture to be natural, are not, but rather socially constructed. This is the place to say that social differences are, by ideology, naturalized as inevitable, rather that interrogated and critiqued as socially constructed (Ebert, 1996, p. 8).

It is important to note that Apple’s (and Collins’) triptych formulation of race, class, and gender does not enable understanding of the relations between these three formations. In the triptych formulation, they are unified only at the level of experience, and even there each may not be acknowledged. In contrast, the Marxist theory of class does provide an integrated and transformative understanding of the three.

In the Marxist theory of the social, as opposed to that of the revisionist left, individual differences and differences within individuals are valorized under capitalism only to be curtailed by being pressed into the service of “the specific end and aim, the sum and substance, of capitalist production”: “the production of surplus-value [profit]” (Marx, 1867/1967a, p. 298). Individual differences are not under capitalism brought out so as to allow human capacities to be developed for their own sake and for the benefit of all, but in order to be shaped so that they can be used to enrich the capitalist class by being developed as labor-power. As Marx and Engels argued, “differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex”(1848/1985, p. 88).

In other words, the core opposition between labor and capital that structures all production practices is used by the capitalist class for one purpose: “production of surplus-value [profit],” which as Marx explains is “the absolute law” of the capitalist mode of production (Marx, 1867/1967a, p. 618). The capitalist class, in its quest for ever more surplus-value, seizes upon any opposition that, owing to historical developments preceding or within capitalism, enables the production of more surplus-value. As Marx argues, the “division of labour seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society and everywhere lays the foundation of that all engrossing system of specializing and sorting men” (1867/1967a, p. 354). These socially constructed and ideologically naturalized and enforced oppositions – those involved in race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and so forth – are folded in to the core opposition of labor and capital. In Capital volume 1, in the chapter on “The Working Day,” Marx in fact shows how and explains why gender and age were folded into class.

This is to say that, in capitalism, race is class, gender is class, ability is class. This is not to argue that race, gender, ability, and so forth are not heavily mediated by cultural practices informed by ideology. They are. And those cultural practices informed by ideology have devastating effects on individuals and social groups. As McLaren and Scatamburlo d’Annibale (2004) have argued, “An historical materialist approach …acknowledges the ‘material’ force of ideologies – particularly racist ideologies.” However, as they go on to explain, such an approach acknowledges ideologies also as forces that “assign separate cultural and/or biological essences to different segments of the population which, in turn, serve to reinforce and rationalize existing relations of power” (p. 186).

In other words, cultural practices informed by ideology enable the reproduction of race, gender, ability, and so forth as class. From the vantage point of classical Marxism, then, Apple, in his separation of race, gender, and class into separate “dynamics” does not serve the interests of the proletariat as a whole, and in fact, works to shore up ideological understandings that reproduce inequity.

Marxism does not valorize the proliferation of differences said to be actually existing, since to do so would be to contribute to the reduction of persons to “instruments of labour.” Rather, through ideology critique Marxism produces revolutionary knowledges which are capable of explaining and transforming the exploitative social relations of wage labor. These relations require that some qualities be ideologically apprehended as constituting identities – age, sexuality, gender. . . – in order to supply the differences which can be hierarchized into strata in the workforce and then used to explain away the hierarchization as “naturally” following from (naturalized) difference.

The Knowledge Industry in/of Education: Professional Ideologues and the Dismissal of the Vanguard

What the dominant ideology needs most to secure in order to reproduce the social relations of production in capitalism is the subject who understands herself to be “free” and therefore understands the sale of her own labor-power on the market to be the practice of freedom rather than the effect of “the dull compulsion of economic relations” (Marx, 1867/1967a, p. 737). All knowledges which attempt to inculcate the subject as “free” must involve a double move: the cause of all inequity – the fact that the binary class relations of exploitation emerge from the historical development of private ownership of what is socially produced, specifically, the means of production – must be occluded, and a cultural space must be opened in which the individual or group has agency, and therefore believes he or she is free within the given mode of production and that knowledge of class is therefore no longer necessary. This is a tactic used by the knowledge industry. Morton (1990) has theorized it as the practice of “set[ting] the limits of the horizon surveyed in such a way as to occlude the ‘troublesome,’ while claiming to open up issues to the full spectrum of ‘reasonable’ views” (p. 57).

Apple, in using a Weberian-based theory of class, and other writers such as Allman (for a critique, see Kelsh, 2006) , in rejecting the centrality of property to the concept of class, both engage in this practice of opening up issues to the full spectrum of “reasonable” views: a wide variety of classes. They disappear the “troublesome”: class as that which is determined by the social (property) relations of production. In this way, they open a space for individual or group agency.

Apple in particular, by pluralizing the Marxist concept of property from the vantage point of “market situation,” makes it possible for everyone to be an “owner” of something and have a degree of power and therefore agency or “freedom.” His Weberian-based theory of class, that is, is deployed both as an alibi to explain away inequitable access to resources (rather than to explain the cause of it), and as that which opens the space for the agency of the subject: one can, by apprehending the social from the vantage point of the market, believe that the exercise of agency consists in the rational calculation of the most effective means to realize the life chances allowed by the market situation. Because this is a “freedom” which masks that persons who do not own the means of production are compelled to sell their labor-power, it is a “freedom” which protects the regime of wage-labor from question.

As we will explain, a Weberian-based theory of class, such as that used by Michael W. Apple, does not contradict the interests of the capitalist class because such a theory of class can ultimately be used to reproduce a “liberal” view of the subject as “free man” who “is the cause, and not the effect, of social meanings” (Zavarzadeh & Morton, 1991, p.1).

The understanding of class underpinning Apple’s works, in which everyone is regarded as an “owner” of something or other and can imagine based on that ownership of “possessions” that she has a degree of power and therefore agency or “freedom,” aligns with the Bush Administration’s theme of the “Ownership Society,” the “unifying theme on domestic policy as put forth in President Bush’s [Second] Inaugural Address” (Rosenbaum, p. 20). It is also in alignment with themes Margaret Thatcher has often used, as, for example, when she argued that “Private ownership – of companies, of homes, of property of every kind – goes far deeper than mere efficiency. All of us in politics have dreams. It is part of mine to give power and responsibility back to people, to restore to individuals and families the sense and feeling of independence. The great reform of the last century was to make more and more people voters. The great reform of our time is to make more and more people owners” (Thatcher, 1986).

As explained in the USA in the Economic Report of the President (2005), “When used in economics, the term resource refers not just to natural resources, such as land or clean air, but to anything of value, such as skills. A property right refers broadly to the arrangements society uses to assign people control over resources” (p. 118). As in the Weberian understanding of class, “property” in the understanding of the Bush Administration refers to any tangible or intangible entity an individual can be said to possess and bring to the “market.” As explained in the “Overview” of the Economic Report, “Property rights have a variety of names, including deeds, titles, permits, vouchers, allowances, or accounts” (“Overview”). Thus in the framework of the Ownership Society, “property” includes homes, health savings accounts, social security savings accounts (Office of the Press Secretary, 2004), and school vouchers (Rosen, 2005).

On the basis of this very broad and Weberian-based understanding of property, David Boaz, executive vice president of The Cato Institute, claims that “increasing numbers of Americans are becoming capitalists – people who own a share of productive businesses through stocks or mutual funds” (n.d., para. 6). Yes, notes Robert Reich, “It’s true that more than half of American households now own stocks in corporations. But for most, it’s just a few thousand dollars worth. And the total value of their current portfolio is less than they invested” (2004, para. 4).

However, all these people are not capitalists insofar as the “property” they own does not enable them to live off the labor-power of others, and does not, for example, enable them to incorporate in a country where labor-power is cheaper and command that labor-power in the interest of appropriating ever more surplus-value. Instead, most live in fear of losing health care, seeing their retirement accounts wiped out, or watching as a chief executive engages in such risky (market) behavior (for the purpose of more profit for the few) that thousands of dollars invested in stocks evaporate. It is the ability to critique the bourgeois class interests of notions such as the “Ownership Society” that is lost when the concept of property is either erased, as it is in Allman (for a critique, see Kelsh, 2006), or pluralized, as it is in Apple.

Indeed, Apple’s works in particular not only removes the capitalist class from view, but provide alibis for the capitalist class. He describes what he calls the “professional and managerial new middle class” (2006; see also 1992, pp. 134-136, 140-142):

This fraction of the professional new middle class gains its own mobility within the state and within the economy based on the use of technical expertise. These are people with backgrounds in management and efficiency techniques who provide the technical and ‘professional’ support for accountability, measurement, ‘product control,’ and assessment that is required by the proponents of neo-liberal politics of marketization and neoconservative policies of tighter central control in education. (2006, p. 48)

By advancing an understanding of class in which there is no capitalist class, Apple takes the focus off of the capitalist class and puts it on this class fraction. An example of the way this alibi for the capitalist class becomes taken up is evident in the “Manifesto” of the students occupying the Sussex University Library:

We are here because the standards at Sussex University are falling. We believe that the recent cuts to the library epitomize the problems facing students at this university. We believe that we are entitled to a high level of education and thatlarge seminars and few resources, either academic or material, are not going to achieve this. We regret that this action may inconvenience library staff and we stress that this action is in opposition to the library cutbacks and redundancies perpetrated by university senior management. We demand more transparency from the university and that it calls an emergency council meeting, open to all students, during term. We want to show the university the extent and level of discontent among students and we wish to show our complete support for the aims of the sortUSout campaign [the general campaign against the cuts at the Uni of Sussex], as well as the staff in all their industrial action. . . .From Bogota to Paris, our struggle at Sussex University is global. (Personal communication, MarxSIG, March 10, 2006)

In the view of the students, the cause of inequitable distribution of resources is “university senior management.” The students’ focus is not on the capitalist class, and this may block the development of their class consciousness. What is necessary to explain is why university senior management made such decisions, and to implicate their decisions in the totality of capitalist practices.

This is not to argue that the student action and statement are not important. They are important, as are tens of thousands of other local, sectional, trade-based, and community-based issues, as we noted in the Introduction. And in such conditions class consciousness can develop. However, class consciousness cannot develop without the theory that, as Marx notes in his Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capitalvolume 1, “represents the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes – the proletariat” (1867/1967a, p. 16). It is this very theory that Apple, in all his works, denies to the proletariat, and which we are working to make available.

It is also necessary to note that there is nothing “new” about the “middle class” fraction Apple describes here. As Apple is well aware (1992, p. 127), classical Marxism theorizes that “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it” (Marx & Engels, 1965/1989, p. 64). But as Apple himself explains, “These ideas,” (i.e., the ideas of the capitalist class) “were under constant threat, however. They needed constant attention because hegemonic control was not guaranteed. Because of the class conflicts also generated out of, and causing, changes in that mode of production, there always existed the possibility of different ideological tendencies which could subvert the dominant ones” (1992, p. 127).

What one of us (Kelsh, 1998, Part I, section II and Part II, section VIII) has theorized as the class fraction of knowledge workers constituting the knowledge industry is a class fraction that arises from the material circumstances Apple summarizes above. The concept of the knowledge industry follows Marx and Engels’ understanding of management of the ruling ideas by “its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood” (1965/1989, p. 65). The knowledge industry, which opposes the organization of all workers into a proletariat class-conscious movement, is not a “new” fraction but a fraction that has a material basis in the relations of production and becomes quite prominent during prolonged periods of crisis in capitalism, which themselves occur more and more as the contradictions of capitalism intensify.

As the contradictions of capitalism intensify, it becomes necessary for the bourgeoisie to revolutionize the means of production to increase profit. It also becomes necessary for Capital to manufacture knowledges that ease workers through the shifts in the relations of production that the revolutionizing of the means entails. In other words, outsourcing, downsizing, intensification of work – all of these require that knowledge workers (academics, media commentators, publishers, and so forth) manufacture and disseminate knowledges that update the ruling ideology and naturalize it.

The understanding of the social put forth by Apple, where neither the economic, the political, nor the cultural sphere is determinant (1993, p. 25), and instead determination by any “sphere” is seen to be “historically contingent” (1993, p. 5), advances a view of the social in which local analyses are the only ones possible. In such a framework, it becomes impossible, as Ebert argues, “to connect the mediated [cultural practices] to other social practices, and consequently the inquiry into and analysis of the mediations, themselves, takes the place of knowledge of the social totality in which mediations are relays of underlying connections” (1996, pp. 42-43).

For historical materialists, however, “cultural and ideological practices are not autonomous but are instead primary sites for reproducing the meanings and subjectivities supporting the unequal gender, sexual, and race divisions of labor, and thus a main arena for the struggle against economic exploitation as well as cultural oppression” (Ebert, 1996, pp. 42-43, emphasis added). The work of the knowledge industry (those knowledge workers who update the ruling ideology and naturalize it) is to augment ideology rather than critique it and expose it as a site of class struggle. (4)

It is the work of the knowledge industry to augment ideology, and this is not “new.” Augmenting ideology is the central practice of the knowledge industry which Marx does not name but nevertheless critiques in the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital: “in France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize-fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic” (1867/1967a, p. 15).

These prize- fighters – today they are “academostars” – manufactured the “reactionary socialism,” “conservative, or bourgeois socialism,” and “critical-utopian socialism and communism” critiqued in The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels (pp. 106-118). Those who, as Marx argues in the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital, “still claimed some scientific standing and aspired to be something more than mere sophists and sycophants of the ruling-class, tried to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to be ignored, of the proletariat. Hence, a shallow syncretism, of which John Stuart Mill is the best representative” (p.15). In Imperialism, Lenin later theorized this fraction as a “stratum of bourgeoisified workers” who are “the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the labour movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real channels of reformism and chauvinism” (1939, p. 14).

All of this points out that Apple, in his claim that “binary working class/ruling class models neglect the crucial role played by the middle stratum” (1992, p. 134), is working as a part of the knowledge industry and manufacturing a claim. This relates directly to the second point we would like to make about this “professional and managerial new middle class.” It is that Michael W. Apple himself, along with the many others who truncate, dismiss, trivialize, and otherwise evacuate the Marxist concept of class of its core transformative concepts, are a part of this fraction.

In distorting in order to dismiss classical Marxism, and in substituting a Weberian-based theory of class for the Marxist theory of class, they engage in the very “product control” Apple discusses as the work of this “new” class fraction. As he notes, “managerial discourse provides ‘subject positions’ through which people can imagine themselves and their institutions in different ways” (2006, p. 25). That is precisely what Apple does, and his discourses are ideological in that they seek to enable individuals to solve in the theoretical imaginary contradictions rooted in the social relations of production.

It is the work of the vanguard, which opposes the “fraction of the professional new middle class” Apple advocates, to make transformative theory available to the proletariat (as we are attempting to do here). The vanguard is theorized by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto:

In times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. (p. 91)

Apple forthrightly opposes the vanguard (2006, p. 81). Thus, while the capitalist class has its spokespersons, the proletariat does not! This is the case especially when one considers that all Apple offers as a role for those who oppose the “fraction of the professional new middle class” is what he refers to as a secretarial role: he wants a group to “act as secretaries for some of our colleagues in education and for the activists in multiple communities, making public their partial, but still successful, resistances to the regime of regulation that we are currently experiencing” (2006, p. 122).

His service to the capitalist class is in full view here, as he deflects attention from the capitalist class and the regime of wage-labor and replaces it with the “regime of regulation,” and offers only the dissemination of local experiences, which, as we have already argued, simply reiterates dominant discourses.

By discrediting and erasing the Marxist concept of class, Apple and others deny workers the access to revolutionary theory that is necessary for the development of class consciousness. As Lenin argued, “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” (1902/1969, p. 25). In doing so, revisionist left theorists manufacture a knowledge that contributes to the production of subjects who are unable to understand their own position in the social (property) relations of production.

The Assimilation of the Left into the Service of Capitalist Interests

In the context of critiquing Apple as a member of this “professional and managerial new middle class,” it is quite telling to note the following argument he makes about this “class”: “Members of this fraction of the upwardly mobile professional and managerial new middle class do not necessarily believe in the ideological positions that underpin all aspects of the conservative alliance. In fact, in other aspects of their lives they may be considerably more moderate and even ‘liberal’ politically.” Yet they do this work of management because “their own mobility depends on the expansion of both such expertise and the professional ideologies of control, measurement, and efficiency that accompany it” (2005, p. 387; 2006, p. 105).

This needs to be read in relation to Apple’s reliance on and advocacy of Erik Olin Wright’s work. Apple draws heavily on his work, and at the 2005 AERA convention in Montreal, advocated use of Wright’s theory of class (Kelsh & Hill, notes, April 14, 2005).

Wright’s formulation of class across his many works is a Weberian-based one that is useful to look at closely for several reasons. In addition to the fact that his ongoing work on class is highly influential in the social sciences, he has participated in some of the crucial debates surrounding “new class” theories such as the 1979 debate over Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s formulation of “the professional managerial class” anthologized in Between Labor and Capital (Walker, 1979). Wright is well-read in classical Marxist theory, having spent much of his professional career debating in a number of texts the “problems of the conceptual foundation of Marxist theory” with colleagues whose work now forms the core of what is known as “analytical Marxism” (Wright, Levine & Sober, 1992, pp. 2-7).

Moreover, Wright knows well that the classical Marxist concept of class is centered on relation to property and that one class has because the other does not: as he says, “the welfare of the rich causally depends on the deprivations of the poor – the rich are rich because the poor are poor; and that the welfare of the rich depends upon the effort of the poor” (Wright, 1989, p. 8; original emphases). He has furthermore revised his previous theory of “contradictory class locations,” which was central to the debate over the Ehrenreich’s theorization, in order to put exploitation rather than domination at its center (1989, pp. 12-14). Finally, he explicitly rejects the Weberian definitions of class because they are “‘market based’ definitions, whereas Marxist definitions were ‘production based'” (1989, p. 13). And yet, in his book The Debate on Classes(1989), he reproduces a Weberian theory of class to which he adheres in subsequent texts (for example,Class Counts, 1997).

“Organization,” Wright argues, “is a productive resource in its own right”; it is a “productive asset,” a form of property which he conceives to be “independent of the expenditure of labor power, the use of means of production, or the skills of the producer” (1989, p. 16). Through this move, in which organization capacity or “knowledge” is severed from both the question of “organization (knowledge) for what purpose” and the material conditions of possibility that allow some forms of organization to surface and not others, Wright further pluralizes an already pluralized understanding of property (insofar as he already accepts Roemer’s understanding of “skill” as property).

Thus for Wright, class is not constituted in the relations of production as Marx understands them, but in culture on the market, as Weber understands it. Wright’s theory in the end is not fundamentally different from Lyotard’s theorization of postmodernism in which it is accepted that “knowledge has become the principle force of production over the last few decades” (1989, p. 5), and this despite Wright’s ostensible return to the concept of exploitation. Because he pluralizes property, Wright’s “exploitation” is still “domination” in the way that Anthony Giddens, following Weber, formulates it in relation to his understanding of “power” as “the capacity of actors to secure outcomes where the realization of these outcomes depends upon the agency of others” (1979, p. 93). This is a Weberian theory of power – “power” is “the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action” (Weber, 1914/1968, p. 926).

Wright’s is a theory of class that substitutes domination for exploitation and puts it at the center of social life. Domination presupposes that power comes from the individual, from his or her “will.” As such, it is a concept that cuts the relation between one’s capacity to secure outcomes in one’s favor, and the stolen labor-power of the proletariat that the capitalist class uses to enable one to secure outcomes in one’s favor. As Weber writes, “the structure of dominancy and its unfolding is decisive in determining the form of social action and its orientation toward a ‘goal.’ Indeed, domination has played the decisive role particularly in the economically most important social structures of the past and present, viz., the manor on the one hand, and the large-scale capitalistic enterprise on the other ” (1914/1968, p. 941). Power is here entirely separable from property and labor-power such that formulations and discussions of class can address power in local senses only, manufacturing and promulgating power as an issue of individual “will,” “imagination,” “hope,” “commitment,” or “competition,” cut off from the social relations of production and thereby masking them.

Knowledge workers never stand outside the contradictions of capitalism and are subject to them, open to assimilation into the knowledge industry whose proposals for “reform” play into the occlusion of class and class interests that are beneficial to the bourgeoisie. As Angela Davis (1997) has recently argued, while militant activists who achieve positions of power in the state apparatus “truly believe that they will be able to bring about radical transformations from and within new positions of state power,”

under such conditions transformation is conceptualized very differently. The formulation of radical prison work as leading toward the reduction of prison populations and the abolition of jails and prisons as the primary means of addressing social problems such as crime, unemployment, undereducation, etc. recedes and is replaced with the goal of creating better, more progressive jails and prisons. I am not suggesting that we should not use whatever political arenas are available to us. However, once one becomes integrated into state structures, it becomes increasingly difficulty to think about ways of developing radical oppositional practices. (pp. 307-309)

Wright’s comments in his Preface to Classes (1985) speak to this assimilation, as he discusses how he has “become integrated into a nexus of rewards that is very alluring,” and how he “do[es] not know” “whether or not. . . the work [on classes] has benefited or suffered from the particular conditions under which it was produced” (p. 3).

In relying on Wright’s theorization of class, Apple himself is assimilated into this “nexus of rewards.”

Acknowledging the capitalist-class interestedness of his position, however, is not something that, using his theory of the social, he would be obligated to do, or even recognize – the Weberian-derived understanding of class he uses is not relational, and thus provides Apple with an alibi for not accounting for his own theoretical position and its effects on the social totality.

Conclusion: For Class and Class Consciousness

The Weberian theory of class is dominant, and in schools as elsewhere, promotes intra-class competition. That is, it has a tendency to exacerbate divisions and antagonisms between students at different socioeconomic levels, as Brantlinger’s (1993; 2003) work, which also uses a Weberian class framework, illustrates. These divisions and antagonisms can function as major obstacles to student agency and educational achievement at all socioeconomic levels. The reproduction and circulation of a Weberian-derived understanding of class is also anti-pedagogical because it professes that there are differences, but cannot explain why. The logical extension of it encourages the use among students and others of one’s will and domination to obtain attributes – grades, favors – that enable one to get ahead within the system, and without ever questioning it. If one does not obtain such attributes that enable one to “get ahead,” the only reason within this logic for not doing so is not having tried hard enough.

Assuming a Weberian-derived theory of class creates problems for critiques of capitalism’s role in socioeconomic inequity related to schools. Critical commentary tends to take the focus off the capitalist class and place “blame” on “upper/middle class” discursive practices, and it does so one-sidedly, that is, without explaining the historical and ideological reasons why these strata of the proletariat engage in such discursive practices. Such one-sided blaming is a vulgarized form of critique that is not pedagogical and thus not enabling of “middle” class development of capacity for historical materialist critique and thus class consciousness as part of the proletariat. This anti-pedagogical blaming functions as an exorcism of guilt and contradicts the explicit aim of such texts: to change the practices of these strata from those that enforce the existing order to those that work to expose and change it. Such texts thus occlude the theoretical means to expose and change the existing order, as well as the more necessary object of critique: the capitalist class and property relations.

Owing to this relay where focus is shifted from the capitalist class and property relations to the middle strata practices severed from relation to property relations, the “cause” of socioeconomic inequity and exploitation in schools is shifted from production practices to cultural practices, specifically to discursive practices. This happens because the upper/middle strata do not hold economic power and are seen, following Apple, Allman, Wright, and others to hold only organizational power that appears not to be rooted in the social relations of production – unless one focuses on the Marxist theory of property and class. Ultimately, the shift in focus away from class understood in terms of the Marxist theory of property is a practice on the part of knowledge workers that blocks development of knowledge-producing critique of capitalist class practices. It thus blocks the development of class consciousness necessary to intervene in and abolish the cause of socio-economic inequity: private ownership by the few of the means of production.

It has been our aim in this essay to critique the revisionist left that represents itself as producing the most useful analyses, and to critique it in order to expose the limits of its analyses, together with their implication in the support of capitalist class practices of exploitation. We hold that to most effectively contest the right, and the capitalist class whose interests the right serves, the left must play a part – for example in local, national and global campaigns, and in sectional and particularistic movements – in building the Marxist understanding of social class, class consciousness, and class struggle, rather than occluding, in their culturalization of class, these understandings that are necessary to replace capitalism with socialism.

Notes

(1) In order to enable access on the part of the reader to fundamental texts of classical Marxism and set them in chronological relation to one another and such other texts as those of Weber, we provide in-text citations and references that include both the original date of publication, as well as the publication date of the editions we have used.

(2) The limited purpose of capitalism gives rise to numerous other inversions in the material conditions – the exploitative social relations of production – in which all persons live, for example: “past labour [capital], dominates living labour” (1894/1967c, p. 45); “it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman” (1867/1967a, p. 423); “in manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers” (1867/1967a, p. 361); machinery, “the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital” (1867/1967a, p. 408); . . . “property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and to be the impossibility, on the part of the labourer, of appropriating his own product” (1867/1967a, p. 584). Overall, Marx argues, “capital. . . becomes a very mystic being since all of labour’s social productive forces appear to be due to capital, rather than labour as such, and seem to issue from the womb of capital itself . relations under which value is originally produced are pushed completely into the background” (1894/1967c, p. 827).

(3) We acknowledge that Michael W. Apple has for several decades kept issues of inequity at the forefront of educational theory and research, and alive in the minds of individuals. Such work is necessary. However, insofar as his work is descriptive rather than explanatory with reference to causality, it does not go far enough. Now – with unprecedented ravages to the environment, health, education, academic freedom, and so forth resulting from the practices of the capitalist class – now is the “untimely time” to move forward and foreground capitalist class society and the contradiction between the classes as the cause that must be abolished. It is time for what Marx referred to as “the ruthless criticism of everything existing,” which as Marx notes is “ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be” (1843/1978, p. 13). It is in the interests of socially necessary societal development that we take up Marx’s call for such criticism.

(4) What happens when the knowledge industry and other ideological state apparatuses do not carry out this function is analysed in Hill, 2004: “Books, banks and bullets: Controlling our minds – the global project of imperialistic and militaristic neo-liberalism and its effect on education policy,” Policy Futures, 2, pp. 3-4 (Theme: Marxist Futures in Education). http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pfie/content/pdfs/2/issue2_3.asp and in Hill, 2001: “State Theory and The Neo-Liberal Reconstruction of Schooling and Teacher Education: A Structuralist Neo-Marxist Critique of Postmodernist, Quasi-Postmodernist, and Culturalist Neo-Marxist Theory”, The British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22, 1, pp.137-157.

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Faith Agostinone-Wilson

We enter 2008 on the knife’s edge of economic crisis.  Foreclosures are a common sight, with entire streets featuring homes for sale.  Home equity is the lowest it has been since 1945 and the nation’s savings rate is zero.  Household debt levels mirror the national debt, with many people putting doctors’ visits and college tuition on multiple credit cards, maxed to their limits.  Food costs are rising at the fastest rates of inflation in fifteen years, far outpacing the amount that food stamps allotments.  Charity-based food pantry levels are low—arguably the real measure of economic health.  Oil finally reached $100.00 a barrel, impacting transportation and the food supply, built on the corporate agri-business model that relies on long-distance shipping versus local farming.   Jobs cuts are at a five year high, yet the profits of large companies keep rising, the triumph of the Bush tax cuts.

The American economy is linked like a ball and chain to the cash- and soul-sucking Iraq invasion, along with bloated military budgets sustaining a global, imperial presence, mostly used to protect business interests.  With money tied up in Iraq, infrastructure collapse and inability (and unwillingness) to respond to natural disasters such as Katrina are inevitable.  The swooping in of neoliberal city “planners” in New Orleans and Chicago are systematically driving out low income families by mounting an attack on local public school systems.  Substance News documents a record number of school closings in Chicago, paving the way for more “acceptable” whites and upper middle class families to “reclaim” neighborhoods.  These schools, if they are reopened, are made over into selective public or private charter schools that set admissions standards and continually deny services to the poor and families who have students with special learning needs.  The “success” of the Chicago model has been put into play in New Orleans (Quigley, 2007).

An economy on the edge of instability creates the perfect conditions for militarism as the solution to societal problems.  This is reflected in soaring incarceration rates, with 2008 estimates being one out of every 100 adults behind bars (Liptak, 2008).  The situation for African-American adults is even worse in 2008 with one out of fifteen being imprisoned.  At the root of militarism is the belief that humans are inherently bad and in need of authoritarian controls- specifically, controls for those perceived more unruly, such as the poor and minorities.  Artificially created scarcity is the only spark needed to ignite the chain of events the war-makers desire.

Education plays a key role in the justification of militarism and the naturalization of war as “the only solution,” accompanying the dogma “there is no alternative to capitalism.”  Biological determinism resurrects itself through evolutionary biologists like Steven Pinker arguing that humankind is built for war and the free market (Gasper, 2004).  War is a common feature for analysis in K-12 history and social study content standards for the 50 states.  History is taught with war being the primary force of meaning and the locus of social change while at the same time strongly discouraging the rights of oppressed groups to resist through force or extralegal methods.  Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton’s January 2008 statement about civil rights is a reflection of this filtering of history through “official channels”:

I would point to the fact that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality. The power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said, “We are going to do it,” and actually got it accomplished (Media Matters, 2008).

When people do not perceive themselves as having agency in history, they absorb the prevailing ideology, which, according to Marx, is always the ideology of the ruling class.

Overview

This paper is meant to be an accessible analysis of the education/war connection in terms of laws, policy and the economic situation facing young people in America today.  The first of two parts examining the school-to-military pipeline, it is not an overarching exploration of state-sponsored militarism or armed forces advertising in the mass media, as beautifully presented in Education as Enforcement (Saltman & Goodman, 2008).  Though corporate connections are always behind militarism, this paper instead looks closely at the problems facing those interested in resisting militarism at its choke point- recruiting.  It also examines the school to war pipeline’s targeting of young people aged 13-29, including college students.  While assuming that right wing resistance toward anti-militarism is rampant and ubiquitous, scholar-activists cannot ignore the influence of centrist-liberal support for military presence within the schools, contributing to its veneer of acceptability.

It is hoped that a wide audience will find this paper useful, not just within the confines of academia.  A combination of dialectical-materialist analysis along with utilizing popular media sources in a readable language is the goal.  Building a successful anti-war movement has to involve multiple paths and alliances, not a top-down hierarchy, though leadership and organization is key.  This paper is meant to initiate a conversation about how to build on successful strategies of resistance, by starting at the beginning, so to speak.  I am assuming that I am not the only person surprised to find the extent of the military’s involvement within K-12 schools and universities, as I did when starting to collect research for this paper.  Information will be presented to systematically convey the seriousness of the situation.  Their side is well-armed:  ideologically, legally, monetarily, and literally.  The second installment (forthcoming) will assess the state of the counter-recruiting movement today, along with a historical analysis of military resistance in the draft and post-draft eras.

The two ideologies that make resisting military recruiting the most difficult include: 1) the presentation of the “all volunteer” army and 2) the military being perceived as a jobs training program and college financial aid institution.  This paper will examine these ideologies, along with counter-arguments that teacher educators and other war resistors can use to deconstruct them.  Until these two ideologies can be effectively challenged, building a compelling—and lasting—case for resisting military recruiting in post-draft era schools will not happen.

Though not intending to contribute to a climate of despair, it is very important for those interested in resisting recruiting to understand the scope of what we are up against.  In this vein, a presentation of laws and policies will be the opening, followed by a discussion of the volunteer army and military-as-jobs ideologies.  Counter-arguments will be presented in the form of the economic realities facing young civilians and veterans, often compelling them to enlist.  References used are a combination of scholarly as well as mass media sources, along with recruiting manuals.  In many cases, alternative media and scholarly journals likeInternational Socialist Review, Z Magazine, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, and Substance Newsprovided the most accurate and contemporary coverage of the school to work pipeline rather than traditional academic journals which seemed reluctant to publish work from a revolutionary or Marxist stance openly opposing military recruiting at both the K-12 and university levels.

The Military Presence in the Schools

At a November 2007 Chicago Board of Education meeting, 14 active-duty military personnel were in attendance.  Schmidt (2007) recounts the unusual events:

In order to get in the door, you had to say “excuse me” to a uniformed soldier.  Inside, a squad of Marines was standing, all in uniform, along the walls at the side and back of the meeting room.   One soldier in desert combat fatigues and desert boots was standing in the group of Marines.  There were uniformed soldiers or Marines at both entrances (p.1).

Schmidt was later told by Marine officials that the soldiers had been asked to attend the meeting as a show of support for allowing recruiter access for the Chicago Public Schools (CPS).  “The New Policy on Recruiter Access had been developed as a result of growing parental and civic pressure on CPS to stop allowing military recruiters what amounted in some schools to unlimited access to Chicago high school juniors and seniors” (p.9).  After an anti-war Iraq veteran in support of limited recruiter access testified about her experiences with the JROTC and their misrepresentations–including paying her $100.00 per day to wear her uniform as a high school student to entice others to enlist—the uniformed soldiers had departed the meeting.

Recruiters have open access to schools, at both K-12 and postsecondary institutions.  This has been accomplished through a combination of legislation and relentless cultivation of friendly relationships between the schools and the military through various programs targeting students and faculty.  Asserting that the military should have the same access to colleges as other employment firms, the Solomon Amendment (1996) not only allows access to college campuses, it can authorize the government to take action against postsecondary institutions that prevent recruiting, including denying certain Federal funds.  Noncompliance with the policy is reported by recruiters, who present documentation of potential offenses to the Recruiting Battalion Education Services (School Recruiting Program Handbook, 2004, p.9).

An extension of the Solomon Amendment, the Hutchinson Amendment (2002) allows recruiter access to secondary schools.  Educational agencies have to report directory information to the Department of Defense, “as it is provided generally to postsecondary education institutions” (School Recruiting Program Handbook, 2004, p.9).  Mirroring the process of being sent to the principal’s office, schools that do not comply are reported by the Secretary of Defense “to the specified congressional committee, Senators of the State in which the school is located, and the member of the House of Representatives who represents the school district” (p.9).

Closely related to the Hutchinson Amendment, The Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information, Section 9528 of the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), ties federal funding to the release of secondary student directory information to military recruiters.  While providing the chance for parents and students to opt out, individuals have to make the request in writing, adding an extra step in the paperwork trail that parents are inundated with already.  Proponents of the “volunteer army” are proud to point to the opt-out feature of NCLB to prove the authenticity of “choosing” to join the military, but one wonders that if the military were truly “voluntary,” wouldn’t it make more sense to have to complete paperwork to “opt in” instead?  And why do we have the threat of withdrawing federal funding in all of these pieces of legislation?  Most revealingly, the Recruiting Operations Manual (2006) states that while military officials can ‘remind’ schools that they have to comply, “recruiters and their leaders cannot rely on public law to gain access to schools and students. Real success can come only with a well planned and well executed school recruiting plan” (p.21).

Taking the threat of withholding funding to the extreme and in an act of “red meat revenge,” Senators Jim DeMint (famous for his recommendation that gay people or single mothers who live with their partners not teach in public schools) and Jim Inhofe (who believes climate change is a hoax and that the Weather Channel is in on it) introduced H.R.5222 otherwise known as the “Sempre Fi Act.”  Ignoring the concept of “local control” often favored by conservatives when it comes to excluding minorities, the Act was created in response to the recent Berkeley City Council’s Resolution to limit recruiter access to the city on the basis of a) the military’s discrimination against the GLBT community, b) the tendency of recruiters to renege on promises made to enlistees, and c) the propensity of the military to engage in illegal invasions of other countries. The Sempre Fi Act would rescind funds that would go to Berkley and transfer those funds to Marine recruiting coffers.  As of mid-February, 2008, an anonymous hold has been placed on the bill (Bender, 2008).  Though not likely to pass, the Act is important because it is meant as a domestic PSYOPs not only for the counter-recruiters, but for the public at large, who is supposed to see military recruiters as being constantly victimized by powerful leftists and in need of patriotic protection by the good ol’ boys.

Within the schools themselves, Section 2302 of No Child Left Behind (2001) authorizes funding for the Troops-to-Teachers Program, with a particular emphasis on targeting schools with large percentages of low-income students.  Administered by the Department of Defense, Troops-to-Teachers provides for certification or licensing of veterans to teach in elementary and secondary public schools.  As of 2005, more than 6,000 teachers have been placed in school systems via the program.  “These teachers are strategically placed in prime recruiting areas to help recruiters establish “school ownership” (International Action Center, 2005, p. 23).  In some California schools with large minority populations, veterans are given a six-week course and placed immediately in the classroom (Mariscal, 2004, para.14).

The Marine Corps have used a program called the Educator Workshop (Mariscal, 2004), designed to “win over influencers” (school personnel) by having them attend a week of boot camp (International Action Center, 2005, p.23). Teachers who take part in the “workshop” every year (40 from each recruiting zone) are flown to San Diego or Parris Island and set up in local hotels.  In addition, they are paid $225.00 (Mariscal, 2004, para.11).  The idea behind the program is to create a bond with the military and then carry that excitement back to their schools to pass on to “prospective enlistees” (International Action Center, 2005, p.23).  However, Mariscal (2004) points out, “military veterans are considered to be potentially disruptive given their first hand knowledge of military values and practices” and are not allowed to participate in the workshop (para.13).

Indeed, the military is highly intent on making as many connections with “influencers” as possible, as indicated in this passage from the School Recruiting Program Handbook (2004):

Many faculty members are prior service or are current members of the United States Army Reserve.  Try to identify these individuals and develop them as centers of influence (COIs).  Your goal is to develop as many COIs as possible for the schools.  Don’t forget the administrative staff since many of them act as policy makers.  Establish and maintain rapport and always treat them with respect.  Also, have something to give them (pen, calendar, cup, donuts, etc.) and always remember secretary’s week with a card or flowers (p.5).

The Handbook goes on to instruct recruiters to look for student influencers, “…class officers, newspaper and yearbook editors, and athletes” who “can help build interest in the Army among the student body” (p.3).  “First to contact, first to contract” is the policy outlined, with the warning “if you wait until they’re seniors, it is probably too late” (p.3).  Recruiters are expected to actively promote a positive image of the military to students old enough to begin thinking about their career.

The Recruiting Operations Manual (2006) uses a bizarre juxtaposition of military doctrine (in italics) and recommendations (directly below, in regular font) for appealing to students, as in the following two excerpts, begging the question, who is the “enemy?”

Never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage.
1-26. Recruiters must establish and maintain a visible and active presence in their markets. By so doing, recruiters will promote the Army as the service of choice for he young people they seek to recruit (p.17).

Strike the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he is unprepared.
1-27. An Army recruiter will likely surprise no one when he or she visits a high school or college campus. However, the recruiter can create surprise—even delight—by demonstrating genuine interest in young people. Some people will expect an Army recruiter to have an interest in nothing more than “filling his quota.” The oldier or civilian employee who counsels and mentors young people and lives the Army values will indeed surprise those people (p.17).

Similar to the School Recruiting Program Handbook (2004), that warns ominously “like the farmer who fails to guard the hen house, we can easily lose our schools and relinquish ownership to other services if we fail to maintain a strong school recruiting program (SRP)” (p.2), the Operations Manual (2006) states that “recruiting quality soldiers to fight the Global War on Terrorism means recruiters and their leaders must be fully engaged with the market” in the schools (p.29).  Schools are pivotal, because “without a strong schools program, you cannot have an effective grad recruiting program” (p.21).  Using language like “taking the offensive” (directing the nature of an operation), “market areas of interest” (all educational institutions, public and private), “total market penetration” (schools and the larger community), “target rich environment” (a school with a lot of potential recruits, i.e. poor and minority), the Operations Manual is straightforward in its goals with minimal ambiguity.

School recruiting programs are now targeting Latino/a students, who compose 22% of the recruiting market, twice the rate of Latino/as in the general population (roughly 13.5%) (Mariscal, 2004, para.3).  “Visit any high school with a large Latino population, and you will find JROTC units, Army-sponsored computer games, and an overabundance of recruiters, often more numerous than career counselors” (para.6).  An entry point to recruiting minority students is the administration of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) during the junior or senior year of high school.  The ASVAB is not only an enlistment screening tool, it is a way for recruiters to insert themselves into schools by helpfully providing “a cost-effective career exploration program” to low-income schools (School Recruiting Program Handbook, 2004, p.7).  Along with the ASVAB, the Army has developed online software called March 2 Success that preps students for the ASVAB, meant to enhance their helpful image (p.7).  As the Handbook (2004) states, it is “reasonable” for school officials to allow recruiters to present help in interpreting ASVAB scores.  In addition, each recruiter is supposed to prepare a detailed school folder including the scores, documentation related to teachers’ and students’ level of interest and opportunities for “career” presentations at school events (p.4).

Colleges and universities are not immune from military strategy, either.  The Concurrent Admissions Program Manual (2002) describes partnerships between postsecondary schools and the Army, including assisting veterans in obtaining course credit for time spent in the military (Army/American Council on Education Registry Transcript System).  Veterans and active-duty soldiers are encouraged to select a local college from a list of over 1,540 participating schools (The Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges), because the local campus will be easier for the recruiter to “partner” with (p.4): “the college will view the recruiter as an excellent source of future students, enabling the recruiter to improve access and high-grad recruiting on that campus” (p.3).  Colleges are even encouraged to enroll recruiters who are working on degrees: “Help recruiters understand your college so well that they will unhesitatingly refer their enlistees to your college!” (p.7).

Militarism as a whole must be resisted and stopping recruiting is a good place to begin.  As Mariscal (2004) argues, military values are located at all levels of culture, emanating from the capitalist state.  Unchecked and unchallenged, militarism starves the rest of society of necessary resources that would go to meet human needs, not corporate interests.  One challenge we face in resisting recruiters is that it is easy to slip into an easy sense of schools being “our” institutions, since many of us attended public schools for 13 years.  These schools provided some of the only forms of stability and introduced us to the importance of learning and critical thought.  Influential teachers nurtured and cared for us.  We might be tempted to think that these institutions can be reformed to serve the people’s needs.  However, as Gibson, Queen, Ross, and Vinson (2007) warn,

…schools embedded within a capitalist nation, especially capital’s most favored nation, are capitalist schools, their schools, not ours, until such time social upheavals or civil strife are at such a stage that schooling is either dramatically upended, or freedom schools operating outside capital’s school supercede them (para. 51).

In a similar vein, it is their troops, not “our troops” when it comes to the military.  Indeed, the primary purpose of any military, along with the police, is to protect the ruling elite and their property, not the working class. As long as the troops support their mission, they are not our troops, until they decide to dramatically upend the system by refusing to fight or sabotaging the system from within, keeping in mind that there might be several stages of readiness at play. The fact that they might be working class themselves and buy into the system only makes the situation that much more challenging.

Compulsory Volunteerism

The “volunteer” army is a skillful rhetorical device used to sustain support for military presence in the schools.   Alongside volunteerism is rampant privatization, borne out by the figure of 130,000 mercenaries with 145,000 active duty forces serving in Iraq, “an effective doubling of the size of the occupation force” (Scahill, 2007, p.24).  Scahill summarizes the political importance behind the image of the volunteer army on a global level in his book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army:

What we see here is an insidious system where you want to avoid having a draft in your country; you want to keep it off the table for political reasons.  You can’t convince the world to participate in your global wars of conquest, and so what you do is you make the whole world your recruiting ground.  You use these private companies to go into the poorer countries of the world, countries that have been systematically destabilized by the United States, and you hire up the poor of the developing world, and you deploy them to kill and be killed in Iraq against the poor and suffering of Iraq” (pp.24-25).

According to Mariscal (2004), here in the U.S., these imperialist adventures will require an endless supply of reserve troops, so “what better institutional site to conduct such a campaign than the nation’s dysfunctional public school systems that have been thrown into chaos by massive budget cuts, overcrowding, and neglect?” (para. 16).  While there is no draft in official policy, the poverty draft includes those students being targeted with promises of services that are continually denied them in the larger world, services which are seen as components of basic human rights according to the 1948 United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (International Action Center, 2005; Kamenetz, 2006; Spring, 1999).

People join the military not because they want to, but because they have to (Aleman, 2007).  Rasmus (2007) describes the historical shift in unions over the past 150 years, ultimately impacting worker/boss power relations among the non-unionized.  From the post WWII 1940s to the mid-1970s, there was an expansion of militant collective organizing, with health care, pensions, inflationary raises, and job security being on the list of demands.  “…this was the golden age of contract bargaining, and of what might be called ‘contract unionism’ (p.45).

From the late 70s onward, a shift occurred as part of a corporate offensive.  Massive bargaining agreements were disrupted through legislation and a focus on concessions within existing contracts.  “This period, which lasted until the present, might be called “concessionary unionism,” with its focus on minimizing the reduction of magnitudes and values in bargaining” (Rasmus, 2007, p.45).  Now, unions are in the role of partnering with businesses, further eroding hard fought contracts, and shifting health care costs to the employee via high-deductable private insurance plans, and selling off pensions to be managed for profit.  “This new condition might be indentified as the era of “corporate unionism” where unions become even more integrated with the strategies, aims, and objectives of global corporate management” (p.45).  All of this contributes to the uncertainty that workers and young people about to enter the workforce experience.

With traditional avenues of security fast disappearing, it is no wonder that people are “forced to turn towards the offered benefits and financial security of the Armed Forces” (Aleman, 2007, p.13).  In A Deserter’s Tale, Key (2007) outlines in plain talk how his economic situation drove him to enlist with only ten dollars in his pocket the day he stepped into the recruiting office:

I had no money, I had dreams of getting formal training as a welder, I needed to get my teeth fixed, and I wanted to have my kidney stone removed.  If only I joined the military, the posters suggested, I would be on easy street.  The armed forces were offering money for college tuition, health insurance, and even a cash bonus for signing up (p.36).

Key goes on to describe how the recruiter befriended him over the following six weeks, becoming “my coach, my guidance counselor, my adviser, and my personal biographer, as well as the provider of coffee, doughnuts, and submarine sandwiches…” (p.39).  The recruiter visited Key and his wife, promising that life on the military base would be safe and rent free “I learned later that this was not true, that about $700.00 would be docked each month from my paycheck [$1,200 monthly] for the rent” (p. 42).  Knowing that Key wanted to become a welder, the recruiter also promised him access to training while he was posted on the base.  Once deployed, Key attempted to talk with an officer to ask about the mismatch between what he was promised and what was actually occurring.  The officer responded, “Soldier, you obviously don’t understand the military way of life…get the hell out of my office” (p.55).  The following day, Key was severely reprimanded and punished by his squad and team leaders and never again asked any questions.

War resister and veteran Eugene Cherry noticed that the bulk of the medics he met during his tour were Caucasian, not African American.  Most of the African-Americans he encountered tended to serve infantry ranks, which were predominantly black.  He saw a direct connection between the demographics of the infantry units and lowest ranks, and the make-up of the schools and neighborhoods targeted by recruiters:  “They’re not going into well-to-do areas like Lake Forest and trying to get those kids to join, but I guarantee you if you go to a neighborhood like Englewood, you’re going to see a lot of recruiting stations” (Ziemba, 2008, p. 15).

Deserter/resistors such as Key and Cherry are not the only ones to acknowledge the precariousness of the “volunteer army” construct.  The Recruiting Operations Manual (2006) states:

Economic factors can have a strong influence on the recruiting environment. The labor market has a direct affect on recruiting operations. When unemployment rates go up, enlistments go up. When unemployment rates go down, enlistments go down. Areas that are economically depressed have higher enlistment rates, as young men and women seek the opportunity to escape economic hardship. A good understanding of the economic situation in their AO enables recruiters to plan their operations for optimum success (p.33).

The Operations Manual also acknowledges that social changes, either regional or national, can enhance the image of volunteerism, such as what happened between 9/11 and the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.  The military capitalized on these “social conditions,” taking care to guard against mistakes in self-presentation during “periods of prolonged war, which are always controversial” and “can sway youth to or from Army service” (p.33).

The Operations Manual likes to brag about soldiers who “leave behind their comfortable homes and temporarily set aside their personal plans to put on the Army uniform to help protect their country from her enemies” (p.133).  One of the most high-profile soldiers, Pat Tillman’s death (under mysterious circumstances) was exploited to promote the myth of the all volunteer army- that Tillman gave up his high paid professional football career to serve his country (Aleman, 2007).  The media portrayed this as if it were true for all enlistees- as if everyone had the same number of options yet chose military service out of the goodness of their hearts.

When social class enters the picture, volunteerism takes a hit.  Jessica Lynch, from a working class background, was used by the military in a similar manner than Tillman by immediately exaggerating her heroism during the early stages of the Iraq invasion.  In both cases, the lies were exposed by Tillman’s family and Lynch herself, but not in time to prevent the damage of the mythology of the all volunteer army that still runs strong in the public’s mind.  And when Lyndie England’s famous pictures emerged of her posing with Abu Graib detainees, the media focused on her as being the one responsible, not the higher-ups. Pundits constantly brought up the argument that the soldiers who participated in acts of torture “chose” to join the military and were therefore obligated to face the consequences (the “few bad apples” defense). Then and only then did they invoke the Nuremburg trials and the notion of personal choice, violating their usual “just following orders” logic used to justify their own misdeeds.  This is the hard lesson of volunteerism for the rank and file- the construct will be used against them with the upper ranks avoiding any kind of punishment.

The condition of young people in the United States argues against the concept of a truly volunteer fighting force.  According to the International Action Center (2005), almost 40% of the homeless population is under age 18.  5.5 million sixteen to twenty-four-year olds are “officially disconnected”- they are not in school or the military, are unemployed, living with others, or outgrown the age limits for juvenile hall and foster care (Kamenetz, 2006, p.70).  One out of 5 children in the United States are born into poverty (Sklar, 2007) with a larger proportion of people in severe poverty reaching a 32 year high, growing more than 26% since 2000 (Aleman, 2007).  Since the 1970s, the top 1% of households has doubled their share of the wealth and white households have seven times as much net worth than households of color (Sklar, 2007). Sklar states that one out of six people under age 65 has no health insurance of any kind with Aleman (2007) putting the figure at 45 million uninsured for longer than one year and 55 million partly uninsured the prior year.  Nearly 30% of nineteen to twenty-nine year olds have no regular health insurance, which is twice the percentage of the population at large, more than any other age group (Kamenetz, 2006).

We have the image of young people as being the best off of any segment of the population on all measures- health, finances, and education.  The International Action Center (2005) places the estimates of youth incarcerated in adult jails at 7,600 with fifteen states setting the minimum age of the death penalty at eighteen.  At the start of 2001, 73 people on death row were there due to crimes they had committed under the age of 18.  Youth of color are 34% of the juvenile justice system population and 62% in custody.  In the past fourteen years, there has been a 51% increase in young people being committed, two-thirds of those being minority youth (International Action Center, 2005).  Overall, the jail and prison population has soared since 1980, with latest figures approaching 1 in every 46 civilians (Sklar, 2007).  One out of every 7 black men ages 25-29 are incarcerated.  Looking just at prisons and not local jails, 10% of black males ages 25-29 were locked up at the end of 2001, compared with 1% of white males (Sklar, 2007; Gasper, 2007).  The total number of the incarcerated stands at 2.2 million, with 4.8 million on parole/probation and prison budgets busting at $61 billion (Gasper, 2007).

The war on crime mirrors the language of the war on terrorism, with a law-and-order mentality that is essentially veiled racism.  Nixon was the first to emphasize tough on crime talk, followed by the Reagan administration’s double offensive on “criminals” and “welfare recipients,” both coded terms for African-Americans (Gasper, 2007, p.19).  This ideology serves to justify militarism aimed at unruly brown citizens, both here and abroad.  It also justifies irrational tougher sentencing laws, with many prisoners serving life terms for petty theft or bounced checks, all in the service of the for-profit prison industry.  According to Gasper, California spends $35,000 per year on every prisoner and only $7,000 annually per K-12 students and $4,000 for college students.  The education/jail connection cannot be more obvious with two-thirds of California’s prisoners reading below a ninth grade level and over half being functionally illiterate.  Funding for inmate educational programs (shown to be one of the most effective ways of reaching younger inmates) has been slashed with only 6% of prisoners in academic classes or 5% in vocational training (Gasper, 2007).

It is difficult to accurately determine the scope of school dropout rates,  because data has been subject to manipulation and error due to self-reporting by high schools, as mandated by NCLB.  Houston is a prominent example of this problem.  Under NCLB, states are allowed to use their own measures for graduation rates, making it impossible to not only obtain national data, but statewide data.  In California, nearly one in three high school students in the class of 2006 did not graduate, the rate dropping to a ten year low (Aleman, 2007, p.12).  Balfanz and Legsters (2004) estimate that between 900 and 1,000 U.S. high schools have a 50/50 chance of graduating its students.  In 2,000 high schools, the freshman class reduces by 40% or more by the time the senior year arrives (p.3).  These schools have weak promoting power, a common feature of schools with high concentrations of poverty and minority students leading to staggering dropout rates.  High dropout rate schools are located in major cities, along with the rural South and West where large numbers of white students attend.  “Nearly half of our nation’s African-American students, nearly 40% of Latino students, and only 11% of white students attend high schools in which graduation is not the norm” (p.6).  Fifteen percent of  these high schools produce close to 50% of the nation’s dropouts, causing a media stir when  Balfanz and Legters (2006) labeled them “dropout factories” (para.2).   “There is a near perfect linear relationship between a high school’s poverty level and its tendency to lose large numbers of students between ninth and twelfth grades” (para.4).

These high poverty schools are the perfect candidates for the “total market penetration” that the military recruiters seek out.  In fact, they have a willing cadre of unelected, self-appointed, bipartisan elites like Bill Gates willing to help in the form of the National Commission on Skills in the Workplace’s Tough Choices orTough Times report.  Tough Choices proposes universal exam-based tracking with all 10th graders having to take a regents exam “terminating the education of those who failed” (Miller & Gerson, 2008, p.16).  Miller and Gerson point out that while the report stresses that students can retake the exams and won’t fail, it will be up to them to display the motivation to persist in obtaining an education, the objectivists’ ultimate dream writ large.  In the language of corporate supremacy, that means “i.e. throwing millions of students out into the streets as they turn 16” (p.16).  One can only guess which remaining public institution will be ready at the helm to welcome in these youngsters.

According to Army statistics, recruiters are already finding it necessary to look to enlisting high school dropouts and “lower-achieving” applicants to meet quotas (Schmitt, 2005).  Even though Army officials insist that they wouldn’t “lower standards” to meet quotas, recruiters “…said they were told in February to start accepting more recruits who are ranked in Category 4 on the military’s standardized aptitude test- those who scored between the 10th and 30th percentiles on the ASVAB” (para.4-6).  In 2004, the Army accepted 465 of Category 4 recruits while in 2005 they accepted 800 such recruits (para.18).  The percentage of new recruits without a high school diploma have reached 10%, up from 8% in 2004 and 2% (the upper limit) of ASVAB low-scorers have been admitted into the Army.

Once in the “all volunteer” military, soldiers are finding that the health benefits they sought to be sorely lacking and highly conditional.  One veteran and war resister believed that the red tape that people encounter “…is really a smokescreen, because behind the red tape there is next to nothing there.  It’s just trying to shield people from seeing that the services are not there” (p.21).  VA hospitals, already understaffed, are now seeing active-duty soldiers as patients because the Department of Defense hospitals are inundated.  “On any given night, there are 195,000 homeless veterans, 9,600 for whom the VA does not have beds.  In the last two years, one-third of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans classified as being at risk of homelessness lost their homes…the suicide rate for veterans is double that of the civilian population” (Binh, 2007, p.52).

The National Coalition of Homeless Veterans estimates that 23% of the overall homeless population are veterans, with a bulk of them having served in Vietnam.  The Department of Veterans Affairs has located 1,500 young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are homeless out of a total 336,000 veterans homeless during 2006 (McClam, 2008).  The three main causes of homelessness among veterans are mental illness, financial problems, and difficulty finding affordable housing- conditions that, not coincidentally, led many to enlist in the first place!  As McClam explains, “Iraq veterans are less likely to have substance abuse problems but are more likely to suffer mental illness, particularly post-traumatic stress…that stress by itself can trigger substance abuse” (para.26), leading to homelessness.  There is growing concern about the unique problems facing Iraq veterans in the form of numerous redeployments, longer tours, and improvised explosive devices, all leading to extreme stress and contributing to the problem of homelessness.

Those who do seek treatment find that the same cutbacks and insurance industry trickeries in privatized medical care affecting the civilian population also impact them.  According to Matt Hrutkay, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the VA web site has a section containing a guide for VA medical providers and doctors encouraging them to diagnose veterans with “adjustment disorder,” “anxiety disorder,” and “personality disorder.”  “The reason they’re doing that is so they can claim there was a pre-existing condition before I joined the army and my issues have nothing to do with being blown up twenty-one times” (Ruder, 2007, p.23).  Eugene Cherry was a soldier/medic who was given prescriptions instead of treatment for his PTSD.  Rather than losing what little bit of sanity remained, he chose to go AWOL in order to get the treatment the military wouldn’t give him.  Choosing to take on the military, he managed to demonstrate through the legal system that he went AWOL due to the PTSD (Ziemba, 2008).

Binh (2007) reports that the VA has a “backlog of more than 600,000 applications and appeals for disability benefits,” most of which won’t be successful (p.52).  The case load is projected to grow by 1.6 million over the next two years.  Veterans who suffer from severe PTSD often receive low disability ratings.   “As of July 2006, 152,669 veterans filed disability claims after fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, and only 1,502 of them received disability ratings of 100%”  (p.52).  Binh recounted how one private received a rating of 40% and has to support his family on the $700.00 per month he receives from the government.  Unable to work due to the PTSD, he is nearing bankruptcy and has been waiting five months to receive treatment at the VA hospital.   A mere 3% of veterans going through the medical system have been granted permanent disability status (it used to be 10% in 2001).  Since 2001, the military has disqualified 22,500 veterans due to “personality disorders” which eliminates them from receiving benefits, “saving the VA $4.5 billion over the course of their lifetimes” (p.52).

100,000 veterans from the first Iraq war later reported mysterious medical conditions such as birth defects, cancer, and unexplained fatigue.  In 1991, there was a two year limit on reimbursements for war-related illness, which eliminated 95% of these applicants from being eligible for benefits since their symptoms didn’t manifest themselves until years later (Binh, 2007).  As one veteran stated, “They are creating veterans every single day who come back from combat and there’s no support structure… A lot of people have to wait until it gets really bad” (Ruder, 2007, p.22).   Another veteran discovered that once he left the army, he had been diagnosed as having an “adjustment disorder” without having seen one medical provider, despite making numerous appointments that were continually cancelled.

When confronted with these figures, proponents of volunteerism among the ruling elite point to the fact that soldiers made an “informed choice” and therefore should have understood the consequences before enlisting.  The “all volunteer” army is a way to ultimately wash one’s hands of the responsibility and discomfort at systematically NOT supporting the troops.  The public is catching on.  Despite their efforts to own schools, including millions of dollars spent on advertising and padding the ranks of recruiters, enlistments in the Army are down by as much as 30% (International Action Center, 2005, p.28).  Well-publicized scandals such as last year’s Walter Reed debacle creates a space for critically questioning what “support the troops” REALLY means.  This indicates that people are becoming aware of the lies and deception that are part of the military and that the beginnings of a mass resistance in the post-draft era are possible.  However, “While the Armed Forces are having trouble reaching recruitment quotas amid an unwinnable war, they are managing retention at record levels.  People already in the Armed Services have a firm understanding hat a civilian world that seems ever more unwelcoming and unreliable awaits them and that the military cocoon is just the opposite” (Aleman, 2007, p.13).

No Money/No Jobs

The recent barrage of military advertising uses emotional music and patriotic themes to promise exciting careers to potential recruits.  Common images include people operating imposing, high-tech machinery and paratroopers emerging from planes in flight.  But, as the International Action Center (2005) points out:  “…there aren’t many aircraft carriers in Des Moines, Iowa.  No one is hiring tank drivers in the Bronx.  And civilian airline companies prefer that you keep the doors closed and that nobody jumps out” (p. 29).  Like the ideology of the all-volunteer army, the military is quick to promote one thing (job training and financial aid for college) while doing another (playing the personal responsibility card when challenged by the public by distancing themselves from ever saying they promised job training or financial aid in the first place).

One cannot deny the allure of vocational training or money for college.  The military has succeeded in the post-draft era by riding the tsunami of public misinformation – who wants to be the hard ass who proposes limiting recruiter’s access to the schools when they only want to provide career counseling and financial aid to disadvantaged school districts?   The situation facing many young people related to employment isn’t exactly upbeat.  Unemployment is the highest for young people with the Census listing 10% compared to 3% for the general population (the rates are most likely higher).  One out of every three African American men and women between 16-19 years old are unemployed, as are one out of five between 20-24 (Sklar, 2007, p.30).  In the United States, one out of four workers makes $8.70 or less per hour and the percentage of full-time workers at the poverty level has soared 50% (p.27).  A household with two children would have to work more than three full-time jobs at the prevailing minimum wage to just break even (p.26).  When it comes to race and labor, African-American income is three-fifths that of whites, unemployment twice that of whites and their poverty rate triple that of whites (p.29).  And youths between the ages of eighteen and twenty four are the ones most likely to hold low wage jobs and are the first to get laid off, contributing to their 30% poverty rate, the highest of any age group (Kamenetz, 2006, p.6).

When the first Baby Boomers made their debut in the job market in 1970, the largest employer in the United States was General Motors offering an average hourly wage of $17.50 in today’s dollars.  Today, the largest employer is Wal-Mart whose average hourly wage is $8.00 (Kamenetz, 2006, p.7).  Kamenetz describes theses as “crap jobs, positions that are “temporary, part-time, with no benefits, and hourly pay.  Included in the crap category are unpaid internships, representing “a $124 million yearly contribution to the welfare of corporate America” (p.101).  These jobs serve not only to enrich the capitalist class, they also intimidate low-wage workers who are always under the threat of dismissal along with serving as a leverage against slightly more privileged salaried employees who fear being replaced by the temps.  In this context, “…the value of a college education has grown in the last generation not because college grads make so much more but because high school grads’ earning has stagnated” (p.95).  Usual markers of adult achievement- shorter time to complete one’s education, higher income, and living on one’s own- are all lower than for youth in the 1970s.  The only thing that has increased is the number of “choices” in consumer goods, made possible by an outsourced economy.

The military capitalizes on the large number of postsecondary school “stopouts,” another term for those who fail to re-enroll or drop out from college altogether.  According to Kamenetz, (2006) in her book Generation Debt, one in five Americans in his or her twenties was a college dropout.  Today, it is one out of three (p.6).  Not only are young people dropping out of college, they are taking longer to earn their degrees:

The nationwide high school graduation rate peaked in 1970 at 77%.  It was around 67% in 2004…of every 100 young people who begin their freshman year of high school, just 38 eventually enroll in college, and only 18 graduate within 150% of allotted time- six years for a bachelor’s degree or three years for an associate’s degree.  Only 24.4% of the adult population has a B.A., according to the Census… (pp.5-6).

The School Recruiting Program Handbook (2004) advises recruiters that “The market is an excellent source of potential Army enlistments due to the high percentage of students who drop out of college, particularly during the first two years…there are certain times during every semester, when, if students are going to drop out, they will do so (pp.8-9).  The Handbook instructs recruiters to compare student rosters from semester to semester in order to identify those who have stopped out.  The recruiter is supposed to be ready and waiting when “work-bound students may realize that they lack the necessary training and experience to land a good paying job or for some college-bound students who planned on continuing their education the expected scholarship money didn’t materialize” (p.3).

In a rare fit of honesty, Dick Cheney once remarked that the military isn’t about job training or providing financial aid.  It exists to wage war.  But all of the advertising and presence during sporting events and on MTV emphasizes training and money.  Dispelling these myths, the International Action Center (2005) states that on the whole, veterans earn 19% less than those with no military experience and that 88% of men and 94% of women will never utilize their military training in civilian jobs (p.29).  The enlistment contract itself features a handy clause that allows the military to make any changes to any part of the contract with no notification required, meaning most likely you will not get the job you want, despite all the promises and handshakes.

Often recruits are told during boot camp that they can choose from an array of military jobs, but once they get out, they are forced into taking less desirable jobs (International Action Center, 2005; Ziemba, 2008).  This happened to Joshua Key, who was promised by a recruiter that he would get to build bridges in the continental United States after finishing boot camp.  Instead, he was promptly shipped off to Iraq, and being the lowest ranked in his unit, was the one chosen to dispose of his companies’ solid waste:

We crapped into fifty-gallon metal barrels, each sliced in half.  When the barrels were full, I would toss in five gallons of diesel, light a match, and use a fence post to stir the shit.  Usually I would have two or three barrels burning at once, stirring them for hours at a time” (Key, 2007, p.77).

It’s important to note that Key wasn’t assigned this job as punishment- it was considered normal procedurefor the lower-ranked enlistees, most of whom were impoverished when they joined the military, to be assigned the worst jobs in the unit.  The School Reporting Program Handbook (2004) regularly distributes job vacancy reports from Reserve units to high school counselors.  Of course the handbook specifies that there is no guarantee that the jobs posted will be available or that the applicant will qualify (ASVAB scores determine qualifications, thus shutting lower-performing students out of the better jobs).

The same hierarchies that are part of capitalist society are reflected in the ranks and structures of the military.  For example, 3% of all Latino/as in the Marines are officers- over 80% of officers are white (Mariscal, 2004, para.3).  Latinos, tend to serve in combat positions (para.5).  In the JROTC, 54% of participants are minority youth; of all JROTC participants, 70% end up being in the lower ranks of the military.  These programs that reinforce unfair hierarchies cost the high schools in which they are located an average of $50,000 per year (International Action Center, 2005, p.11).

The other commonly promoted myth about the military are the signing bonuses and money for college, with $70,000 from the G.I. Bill promised.  Only one in twenty even qualify for the $70,000 to begin with (International Action Center, 2005, p.31).  The most an enlistee can get from the GI Bill is a little over $36,000, barely enough to cover the tuition for four years at a public university.  If an enlistee wants the total $70,000, they have to score above the mean on the on the ASVAB and sign up for the military jobs that are the hardest to fill.  In fact, the amount of money enlistees will receive in hand after signing the contract is zero.  Due to a variety of personal factors, 57%-65% of GI Bill applicants never receive money for college (International Action Center, 2005; Ziemba, 2008).  To qualify for GI Bill money, you have to be honorably discharged (20% aren’t), have to be able to attend school (not likely if you have impairments), have to be enrolled in a VA approved program, and have to survive your tour (GI Bill money doesn’t go to the survivors) (International Action Center, 2005,p.31).  “The average person that does receive money from the GI Bill will get a meager $2,151, not the tens of thousands promised in advertisements” (Ziemba, 2008, p.14).

Of all enlistees who finish four years of military service, only 16% complete a degree program (International Action Center, 2005, p.31).  Like other victims of “government prioritizing,” the GI Bill awards have not kept up with the costs of tuition, which has increased as much as 65% between 1995 and 1999 alone, while GI Bill funding has only jumped 16% (p.31).  Making matters worse, the GI Bill and other promised signing bonuses are loans- to apply for the GI Bill a mandatory, non-refundable monthly deduction of $100.00 is drawn from enlistee’s pay, barely at minimum wage levels to start.   In fact, the military profits from the GI Bill as people give up applying for the funds and the non-refundable deposits are placed into Pentagon coffers (p.32).   And the enlistment bonuses?  If an enlistee doesn’t complete their required tour, they have to pay back the bonus (p.33).

Rampant tuition inflation- public college tuition has gone up four times more than median family income in the 1990s- has not brought on many alternatives for funding a college education (Kamenetz, 2006, p.17).  Like the military, post-secondary institutions have steered students toward loans rather than grants as financial aid.  “One major factor is the decline in state appropriations to public colleges and universities…higher education was known as the budget balancer for states cutting essential services” (p.20).   Clinton did not allocate much funding for the Pell Grant during the sixth reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in 1992.  Instead, student loan maximums were increased and newer unsubsidized loans (where accumulated interest is added to the loan amount) were made available.  Making matters worse, Pell Grants and similar aid packages are not tied to inflation costs but are adjusted during each reauthorization.  “In 1976, the maximum Pell covered 72% of costs at the average four-year public school; in 2004 it paid just 36%…”(p.26).

Reflecting the privatization trend in social services, college education costs are being shifted to students and their families, even as enrollments soar.  In the early 1980s, most federal financial aid came in the form of grants.  Now, most of the funding comes in the form of loans- almost 60% with nearly two-thirds of students borrowing to pay tuition.  As a result, the student loan industry is itself has become a profit-making entity.  In 2005, Sallie Mae made the Fortune 500 as the “second most profitable company in returns on revenue…” (Kamenetz, 2006, p.29).  $85 billion in new loans were the result.  Now, two-thirds of four year students graduate with an average of up to $23,000 in loan debt, an average unpaid credit card balance of $2,169, and one fourth of these students putting their tuition on their credit cards (p.5).  Even 44% of students who were still dependent on their parents and came from households making $100,000 annually borrowed money for school in 2002 (p.7).  Predictably, rates of default on student loans began to rise in the late 80s, reaching 22% in 1992 (p.32).

Even when students drop out of school they have to repay the loans and considering that freshman attrition rests at one-third, further possibility for the debt-and-default cycle begins when one is young:  “If student loans go into default, the government can garnishee 15% of your wages without taking you to court. Under a 1996 law, the feds can seize your Social Security, tax refunds, or even emergency and disaster relief payments to pay off old student loans” (Kamenetz, 2006, p.33).  Even declaring Chapter 7 bankruptcy won’t help- student loans are exempt from forgiveness.  Kamenetz presents economists’ data on “manageable” debt burdens, where payments should be no more than 8% of monthly income.  By these measures, 39% of student borrowers now graduate with unmanageable debt, including 55% of African-American and 58% of Hispanic graduates (p.52).

The trend is also moving toward college savings plans/IRAs with government support being thrown behind benefits that are more likely to enrich those with the money to set aside for these kinds of plans rather than direct assistance to poor and working class families.  This mirrors what Kamenetz (2006) notes about recent “merit-based” grants and scholarships, which she argues are helping the very families who can already afford full tuition in the first place.  Indeed, university awards to families making $100,000+ annually have grown by 145% while families making less than $20,000 annually grew by only 17%!  In addition, “the lowest achieving rich kids attend college at about the same rate (77%) as the smartest poor kids (78%)” (p.42). College attendance gaps between whites and minority groups have widened since affirmative action policies ended in the 1980s and 1990s.    When tuition jumps, the median income of Pell recipients also rises (59% from the early to late 1990s) because of those jumps, “while the poorest families [are] priced out of the market altogether” (p.40).

As Kamenetz (2006) points out, today’s college students, compared to students in the 1970s, are older, require child care assistance, need increased financial aid to offset lower-paying jobs while in school, have more gaps in attendance between high school and college (and between semesters once in college), and require weekend and evening class offerings along with intense advising to ensure graduating.  When our institutions of higher education push these students aside, many will turn to the military for its perceived benefits.  And when the military reflects the same hierarchies and lack of financial aid seen at the colleges and universities, this feeds the cycle of debt and drop-outs that benefits capitalism the most.

Conclusion

In order to resist recruiting, we have to take a hard assessment of the situation, which is fast deteriorating for all segments of the population.  This includes respecting the reasons why many young people are interested in the military and comprehending the combination of debt and desperation facing not only high school students, but also those attending colleges.  Continuing the military metaphor, the government has been in full retreat from funding social services and infrastructure since the mid 1970s.  They have been the ones to “cut and run” in the face of an incredibly patient populace. In this climate, military service looks like the only option until young people join only to discover that it’s the same government denying them health care and education!

References

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Bender, K. (2008, February 14).  Lawmakers won’t back down following Berkeley council’s vote retracting statement to U.S. Marine recruiters .  The Mercury News.  Retrieved February 22, 2008 from: http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_8260944?nclick_check=1

Binh, P. (2007, September-October).  Disposable heroes.  International Socialist Review, 55, pp. 48-53.

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Kamenetz, A. (2006).  Generation debt:  Why now is a terrible time to be young.  New York: Riverhead Books.

Key, J. (2007).  The deserter’s tale: The story of an ordinary soldier who walked away from the war in Iraq.  New York:  Grove Press.

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David Hursh

Over the last several decades, neoliberalism has been presented as a necessary and inevitable outcome of globalization and, therefore, has shaped social, economic, and educational policies. However, neoliberalism or free market capitalism neither achieves the economic and social benefits claimed for it nor functions as a self-regulating system. Instead, neoliberalism, as the current global recession makes abundantly clear, has devastated global economies and wrecked havoc on the environment. Therefore, I will argue the following:

• Over the last several decades, beginning with Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the U.S, politicians, the corporate and media elite have hijacked the process of globalization (the shrinkage of space and time) to promote neoliberalism as the only way in which the world can be organized. Neoliberalism promises to increase economic growth and reduce poverty and inequality. Consequently, neoliberalism, with its emphasis on privatization, deregulation, competition, and the dismantling of welfare and education programs except in the service of capital, has come to dominate the decision-making process.
• Education, from preschools through the post-secondary level, is increasingly reshaped into competitive markets where students are to be assessed via standardized tests with the goal of creating entrepreneurial individuals who will be economically productive members of society, responsible only for her or him self. Neoliberal societies aim to create instrumentally rational individuals who can compete in the marketplace (Peters, 1994).
• However, neoliberalism in practice differs from neoliberals’ theoretical assertions. Instead, writes Harvey (2005), neoliberalism is:

a benevolent mask of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but more particularly in the main financial centers of global capitalism. (p. 119)

• Moreover, by prioritizing profits over other non-monetary aspects of our lives, neoliberalism has been disastrous for the environment, especially after the election of George W. Bush, who refused to endorse reduction in carbon emissions on the grounds that it might hinder economic growth (Bellow, 2005, p. 183). In opting out of the Kyoto protocols, Bush claimed: “I will explain as clear as I can, today and every other chance I get, that we will not do anything that harms our economy…. That’s my priority. I’m worried about the economy” (Bush, cited in McKibben, 2006, p. 18). (Although Bush’s real worry seemed not to be the overall economy but getting profits to corporate executives.
• Furthermore, neoliberals’ faith that markets need not be regulated because markets will regulate themselves, in hindsight, may only be true at the cost of everyone’s well being. For example, repealing sections of the Glass-Steagall Act prohibiting banks from owning other financial companies and reducing oversight, led to banks becoming involved in insurance and other industries, and making questionable mortgage loans. Consequently, when borrowers were unable to make escalating payments, the mortgage and housing industry collapsed, millions have been thrown out of work, and we have entered a global recession. As Brenner and Theodore (2005) state, “neoliberal political practice has generated pervasive market failures, new forms of social polarization, a dramatic intensification of uneven spatial development at all spatial scales” (p. 5).
• The current economic recession has even led some neoliberals, including Alan Greenspan, to acknowledge that if markets are to survive and prosper, they cannot be unregulated. Increasingly, economists and politicians realize that markets need some albeit minimal oversight. However, I will argue that in the U.S., the question is whether Barack Obama will do more than aim to restore market efficiency by instituting some regulations and, instead, subordinate the market to the goal of creating global economic, social, and environmental justice.
• Finally, I will argue that we need to a new educational system that does not focus on training individuals to be economically productive but rather aims to answer the essential questions of our time. For example, David Orr (1994, 2002) and Bill McKibben (2007) argue that environmental sustainability requires rethinking the purpose of education and society. Orr (2002) begins a recent book by asking,

How do we re-imagine and remake the human presence on earth in ways that work over the long haul? Such questions are the heart of what theologian Thomas Berry  (1999) calls “the Great Work” of our age. This effort is nothing less than the effort to harmonize the human enterprise with how the world works as a physical system and how it ought to work as a moral system. (p. 3)

This great work requires that we situate the question of environmental sustainability within larger issues of ethics/justice, politics, economy, agriculture, design, and science and that these become the focus of education.

Hijacking globalization to serve neoliberalism

Thomas Friedman, best selling author of The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005), is a leading proponent of neoliberalism whose views are adopted by corporate and governmental leaders around the globe. While Friedman never uses the term neoliberalism, preferring instead free-market capitalism, the policies he advances are the same: competition, markets, deregulation, privatization, and the reduction of the welfare state. Manfred Steger, in Globalism: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism (2005), portrays Friedman as providing the “official narrative of globalization” (p. 54).

Friedman argues that globalization requires neoliberal policies and that neoliberal policies support the process of globalization. They are essentially two sides of the same coin and we can no more reject free-market capitalism than we can reject globalization. We have, according to Friedman (1999), no choice but to adopt neoliberal policies.

The driving force behind globalization is free market capitalism—the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world. Therefore globalization also has its own set of economic rules—rules that revolve around opening, deregulating and privatizing your economy, in order to make it more competitive and attractive to foreign investment. (p. 9)

Neoliberals, like Friedman, have promoted their policies sufficiently to dominate the public discourse so that people are increasingly unlikely to challenge their assertions. Neoliberalism has become ingrained as the rationale for social and economic policies and, as such, is rarely challenged, but accepted as necessary and inevitable.

A whole set of propositions is being imposed as self-evident: it is taken for granted that maximum growth, and therefore productivity and competitiveness, are the ultimate and sole goal of human actions; or that economic forces cannot be resisted. (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 30)

Neoliberalism and education

Neoliberalism, writes Leitner, Sheppard, Sziarto & Maringanti (2007), replaces the common good and state concern for public welfare with the entrepreneurial individual aiming to succeed within competitive markets. Neoliberal policies favor

supply-side innovation and competitiveness; decentralization, devolution, and attrition of political governance, deregulation and privatization of industry, land and public services [including schools]; and replacing welfare with ‘workfarist’ social policies…. A neoliberal subjectivity has emerged that normalizes the logic of individualism and entrepreneurialism, equating individual freedom with self-interested choices, making individuals responsible for their own well-being, and redefining citizens as consumers and clients. (p. 1-2)

Because neoliberalism is described as inevitable, neoliberal education reforms are also assumed to be “natural” and inevitable. President Bush’s statements supporting the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) exemplify how neoliberals connect globalization with neoliberal education reforms.

NCLB is an important way to make sure America remains competitive in the 21st century. We’re living in a global world. See, the education system must compete with education systems in China and India. If we fail to give our students the skills necessary to compete in the world in the 21st century, the jobs will go elsewhere. (U.S. Department of Education, 2006, p. 2)

In the U.S., elementary and secondary reforms have focused on developing markets in education and, where possible, privatizing education. In order to hold schools accountable for producing productive workers, neoliberal proponents have pushed for high-stakes standardized exams in which teachers and students are punished for failing to achieve test-score thresholds. Such reforms, as I have described elsewhere (Hursh,  2007, 2008) have resulted in an increased drop out rate for students of color and students living in poverty, and a slowing in the reduction of the achievement gap between students of color and White students (Orfield, 2006).

Similarly, over the last few decades, neoliberal rationalities have been infused into post-secondary education. I recently have, with my colleague Andrew Wall, begun to examine the consequences of neoliberalism for post-secondary education. In our paper (Hursh & Wall, 2008) presented at the 2008 meeting of the World University Forum, we argued that neoliberal policies were increasingly colonizing higher education and, therefore, such processes needed to be analyzed and resisted.

We described how,

traditional notions of the purpose of the university, fraught with ambiguous aims including knowledge generation, service to society and liberal education, have been scrutinized and transformed into neoliberal objectives more easily articulated for policymakers (Cohen & March, 1986; Pheffer, 1977; Weick, 1976)…. The university is increasingly conceived ‘as an enterprise,’ with knowledge as a commodity to be invested in, bought and sold, and academics as entrepreneurs, who are evaluated based on the income they generate (Seguerski, p. 304). (Hursh & Wall, 2008)

Consequently,
Universities are conceived less as a place that generates knowledge that is important in itself or for society in general. Instead, universities look to how they can partner with corporations to create knowledge that has an economic benefit. Moreover, universities themselves have become corporatized, seeking to minimize their costs while maximizing their revenue. Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy (2006) describes American Higher Education as increasingly market smart and mission driven, suggesting the reconciliation of the corporatization of the university with traditional university purposes…. Slaughter and Rhoades (2005) and Slaughter and Leslie (1997) describe the emergence of academic capitalism with vivid examples of how fiscal resource tensions and declining state support for higher education have led to a push toward entrepreneurialism, commodification of knowledge and seeing students as consumers whose tuition revenue must be maximized.

The press toward entrepreneurialism is a push to generate a diversification of revenue streams for an institution.  New knowledge, existing expertise, and instructional capacity are all commodities to be operationalized to generate revenue and institutional profit.  An “academic capitalist knowledge and learning regime” has emerged, replacing an ideology of a “public good knowledge and learning regime” (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2005). Faculty in the new academic capitalist environment are pressured to develop research that attracts funding, often in the form of corporate sponsorship, and that generates patents that might be utilized by the office of technology transfer to be transformed into profitable lines of business.  The danger inherent in the push toward entrepreneurialism in research includes narrowing academic freedom and research to what is fundable and permissible to be published under funding agreements (Mendoza, 2007).  The knowledge production is distorted to conform to the market.

Similarly, students become valued not as learners and individuals who will become a part of the fabric of society, but as little economic engines whose knowledge will fuel an economy and at the same time whose tuition becomes essential for the economic vitality of institutions of higher education in the United States (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2005).  The sea change in US policy away from a low tuition and low aid to a high tuition and high aid approach to access and funding of higher education has moved students closer and closer to being pure consumers (Alexander, 1998).  The high cost of tuition means that institutions work to maximize tuition revenue, through escalating tuition, higher enrollment and decreased costs. (Hursh & Wall. 2008, p. 7-8)

Neoliberalism and its consequences for the environment and workers

Neoliberals’ desire to not intervene in markets and to focus on economic growth, primarily in terms of consumption, has both significantly contributed to the   environmental problems that we face and to global warming. For example, the negative consequences of China’s wholesale adoption of capitalist, neoliberal policies have become increasingly evident. Harvey (2005, p. 174) describes how neoliberal policies contributed to the degradation of China’s environment. China now has sixteen of the twenty worst cities in the world with respect to air pollution (Bradsher, 2003) and, according to a recent study, has surpassed the United States as the top emitter of carbon dioxide. Recent reports (Barboza, 2007) indicate that China’s air and water pollution causes 750,000 premature deaths annually and costs $160 billion a year in damages. Furthermore, the drive for capitalist expansion at all costs has contributed to numerous ecological disasters, including benzene and nitrozine spills in the Singhua River (Lague, 2005), which contaminated drinking water for millions of people, and exporting dangerous products, including toys with lead paint, defective auto tires, and poisoned toothpaste.

Furthermore, as I noted above, by privileging markets over the environment, the Bush administration has exacerbated global warming to such an extent that implementing carbon emission reductions now may be too late to halt continued melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica with the related rise in sea levels (Hansen, 2006).

Even though it is Bush’s and other neoliberals’ unending faith in the market that has contributed to our environmental catastrophe, they continue to resist governmental regulations of greenhouse gases or incentives for reducing energy use, and persist in believing that the market will create technological solutions to our environmental problems.

While decreasing corporate regulation, neoliberalism requires that “the state create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices,” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2) including international organizations, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, that pressure national governments to eliminate trade barriers and reduce social spending. In the United States, state and federal governments have intervened to create testing and accountability requirements, including regulations privatizing public schools that serve the interests of private corporations. Neoliberals demand that governments reduce corporate regulations while intensifying their intervention into people’s lives. Under neoliberalism, governments exist to promote corporate profit rather than public welfare.

Moreover, recent research has revealed how neoliberalism contributes to increasing economic (Davis, 2005; Leitner, Sheppard, & Peck, 2007) and educational (Lipman, 2004; Anyon, 2005) inequality within cities. Mike Davis, in Planet of Slums (2005), details the negative consequences that neoliberalism has for most of the world. Many countries, especially in the global South, currently create few if any formal jobs. Davis cites one UN projection that only 10% of Africa’s new workers will find formal jobs (p. 177), and, therefore, few will have jobs in which they earn more than a meager insecure income. Contrary to Friedman’s cheerful description of India’s high tech boom, it is, according to a “leading Western economic consultant … a drop in the bucket in a sea of poverty” (p. 173).

In addition, neoliberal governments play a minimalist role in providing services. Davis cites a Nairobi slum-dweller: “The state does nothing here. It provides no water, no schools, no sanitation, no roads, no hospitals” (p. 62).  Because of the lack of housing and services, the urban slum population continues to grow exponentially, with Black Africa estimated to have 332 million slum-dwellers by 2015. Illnesses related to inadequate water supply, waste disposal, and garbage currently kill 30,000 people daily (p. 142). In 46 countries people are poorer today than in 1990 (p. 163). Many of the world’s cities and much of the world’s populations are growing poorer and the world is becoming more, not less, unequal (Jomo & Baudot, 2007).

Beyond neoliberal economic and education policies

Neoliberalism, then, is a failed policy that has increased economic and social disparity, has led to our current global recession, and has subverted education’s goals in the service of the commodification of knowledge. However, activists, scholars, students have long resisted the subversion of education for the purpose of economic growth and the current financial and environmental crises have further revealed the dangers and contradictions of neoliberal policies.

Rather than describing the breath of that resistance, what I prefer to do here is suggest that the question of how we develop a world that is both socially just and environmentally sustainable can and should be one of the essential questions that we ask in our educational institutions.

We need to ask: How do we develop a just sustainable world, that is, how we are to live on this planet in a way in which we meet “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, p. 8)? In addition, it is not enough to develop a world that is environmental sustainable if most in the global north has a high standard of living and most in the global south are living in poverty `(Bello, 2002). We also need ask is how do we create a “just sustainable world.”

David Orr, a professor in environmental studies, increasingly situates environmental studies within ethical, economic, and political contexts. In particular, he criticizes education and politics for failing to take on the “great issues” of our age. Orr quotes Vaclav Havel (1992), the Czech playwright, writer, and politician, who stated that “Genuine politics—politics worthy of the name…is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community, and serving those who will come after us”  (p. 6)

Bill McKibben, whose early books were on the environment, most recently, in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007), advocates that we rethink our economic principles so that rather than focusing on growth and increasing the Gross Domestic Product, we focus on improving the quality of our lives and our local communities. How do we measure people’s quality of life and how do we develop economies that work towards improving the well being of everyone?

Figuring out how do develop such a world requires that we develop an interdisciplinary understanding of the world that incorporates global politics and local initiatives, science and ethics, history and technology. A good example of the interrelatedness of seemingly disparate issues is Michael Pollan’s (the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food) argument that if we in the U.S. are to decrease the amount of energy we use, improve people’s health, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and combat global warming, we need to rethink what we eat. A month before the election, Pollan’s (200b) open letter to the incoming “Farmer in Chief” outlined his proposal for a new food policy to the incoming president. In the article, he argued that because our current agriculture policies subsidize growing corn, soy, wheat, and rice (most of the corn is turned into corn syrup for our soft drinks or feed for livestock). The subsidies make fast food burgers and soft drinks cheap but vegetables and fruit expensive. Consequently, people are more likely to be obese and suffer from illnesses, such as adult onset diabetes. In fact “four of the top killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, and cancer.”  Therefore, while our fast food may be cheap, we pay for it with our health and rising medical costs.

In addition, the amount of energy necessary to plant, fertilize, harvest, and ship these crops so that they can be made into foods is significant. In the U.S., the food industry uses more energy than used by people to commute to and from work. Moreover, by subsidizing crops that are grown not for human consumption but for cattle, and are shipped long distances contributes significantly to global warming. In writing about food policy, Pollan interweaves what he has learned about agricultural policies and practices, nutrition, diseases, health care, energy use and global warming and concludes that we must change our food policies if we are to reduce energy use, slow global warming, and improve nutrition and people’s health. In fact, he argues that we cannot solve the problem of global warming and our worsening health without confronting our abysmal agricultural policies and developing a new food (rather than agricultural) policy.

My own essential question that I think should be part of the curriculum focuses on how do we develop an environmentally sustainable world that is also socially just? That is, how do we create a world in which we meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of the future, in which humans and other living things continue to flourish? If we fail to answer this question, human civilization and the global environment will decline. Consequently, how we develop an environmentally sustainable world that is also just, that treats fairly people, is the essential question of our time (Bello, 2002).

Answering this essential question requires that we take an interdisciplinary approach to examining a wide range of complicated questions that will require our best scientific, philosophical, political, and economic thinking. For example, we need to ask: How do we develop a global system in which countries that are at various stages of development agree on issues of energy production and use? How do we rethink the production and consumption of food so as to place less of a burden on the environment?

Moreover, I would argue that we are unethical if we are not assisting students in asking and answering questions like these. Rather than thinking about how our students have performed on a standardized test, or whether they have memorized their textbook sufficiently in order to pass an exam, we need to be asking whether our students are learning how to pose questions, collect and analyze data, and make decisions for themselves and their community.

Focusing on these questions will require that we rethink our educational systems away from one in which teachers deposit knowledge in students heads while teaching an artificially segregated subject area to one in which students, teachers, and community members actively work to answer questions that are important to both individuals and communities. Moreover, they allow us to raise questions about the purposes of economic systems and the goals of our society.

Lastly, as essential questions, there is no one agreeing upon the answer as to how we develop a just sustainable world (or even whether this is the question we should be asking).  What makes sense for one community will be different for another. What makes sense at one time will be different from another. Moreover, there will be differences of opinion in what counts as fair. Such questions promote dialogue between communities and countries and a greater understanding of what people face in order to live healthy and safe lives.

References

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Barboza, D. (2007, July 5). China reportedly urged omitting pollution-death estimates. New York Times, p. C1.

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Pothik Ghosh

A talk on March 6, 2009 at the Department of English, Hindu College (Delhi University), organised byBenjamin-Lukacs Circle (a joint initiative of Correspondence and Radical Notes).

To talk about Kafka is to talk of the law and its exception by other means. Exception is created within and by the law to make the latter possible. Like bare life is produced by the law to protect high life on whose behalf it speaks. So, exception is included by excluding. And through its inclusion into law, by it being named as bare life by that law, it is excluded from it. Exception not only proves the law, it is also constituted by it. Clearly, the search by the exception for emancipation from the law, even as it maintains its ontology as ‘exception’, is impossible. Since this exception constitutes the law, its existence reinforces the law and will thus not permit liberation for its ontic position from the law, which can only happen through their mutual abolition. It only (pseudo-)liberates the holders of the exception position at one moment, only by pushing them on to the ontic position of the apparent subject of the law. Josef K’s constant failure in The Trial to figure out his crime though his absurd encounters within the domain of the law shows how crimes are constituted by law in order for it to make and sustain itself.

In Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, the man from the country is prevented by the doorkeeper of the door of the law to open the shut door to discover the meaning of the law that lies beyond it. He wants to cross the threshold of the law to find out what comes before or prior to the law, which determines his place in the universe of his existence by giving him his being and its meaning within it. He – that law-determined being manifest in the case of this parable as the “man from the country” – wants to know what the law is (means) and how does it become possible and come to be. What, kind of, necessitated it. (The emphasis on the word ‘know’ above will become progressively clear as we go ahead with our analysis. For now, it would suffice to stick with the plot of the tale.) The man waits and spends his entire lifetime before that shut door, trying to persuade the doorkeeper, without success, to allow him through it. At the end of his life the doorkeeper tells the man from the country that the door was meant for him but he had not tried hard enough to pass through it. The ironical, almost paradoxical, and seemingly absurd note on which Kafka ends this fable is meant to indicate the impossibility for a being, whose very existence is made possible by the law insofar as the latter creates it, to go outside and beyond the law to discover what lies prior to it. For, a being created by the law cannot step outside of it without obliterating and erasing itself. And if and when such erasure of the being happens, it obviously cannot know what lies outside or prior to the law. In that sense, the door of the law, in ‘Before the Law’, cannot be opened to the outside because there is no outside to the law. The door, even if the doorkeeper had not been around, would have opened out into nothing – no-outside. In fact, they would have opened out into the law itself. That is, clearly, because the outside of the law – the outlaw – is already within it by being its outside. In other words, the outlaw (exception) is constitutive of the law. Law makes itself happen by defining itself with regard to something that is defined in the same movement as-not-the-law, as outside it. The law creates its own outside in order to make itself existentially possible. The law creates its outside even as this outside simultaneously creates the law. The dialectic in this is that the law includes by excluding and excludes by including. The modern capitalist order, in which people, ideas, things and so on are at once hierarchically excluded and productively included is a concrete manifestation of this abstract dialectic of the law.

The law, Kafka shows us by attempting to reduce it to its zero-point, has no meaning outside its fact of being a pure force of domination and determination. Its only meaning is just that. In politics, this problem is captured in sovereignty struggles and rights-based movements where the oppressed of a temporal moment might escape their oppression at another temporal moment but oppression per se does not disappear. If anything, the oppressed keep escaping their oppression by turning oppressors. Thus the diachronicity – or historical change – that such struggles evidently and consciously articulate is apparent and even false as they are caught in the same synchronic vector (history). Such diachronicity is, to my mind, merely temporal and not historical because a real (historical) diachronicity – as opposed to simple quantitative flow of time that according to me characterises temporal diachronicity – founds a new movement or flow of time in a qualitatively different historical direction than what precedes it. Time by itself is – following Walter Benjamin who said that time can be counted but not numbered – merely scalar. It is history and historical ruptures that transform it into a vector with direction whereby the counting of time also becomes its numbering.

Integral to this vision of the law in Kafka is the impossibility of knowing or being a being that can reach a goal. K’s interminable approaching of the castle is a case in point. The more he tries to get there the more his motion seems to regress. It is as if he is merely going through the motions of walking forward (towards the castle), by standing at one point, without actually doing so. The knowing process or subject that originates that process constitutes the object of knowing, as something outside of the knowing subject that has to be known by that subject. For, knowing will not be possible if it does not have an outside that can be known. By the same token, this object in its condition of existence outside the knowing subject, which is of course designated thus by that subject, constitutes the knowing act. Thus the real concrete nature of something cannot be ‘known’ as it is constituted by the knowing process and the knowing subject, whose identity, by virtue of being made possible by the ‘on-the-outside’ existential condition of the ‘object-to-be-known’, cannot in turn be ascertained independent of the act of knowing at a certain moment. Knowing the concrete will, paradoxically, always yield abstractions.

It is this antinomy of knowing that Kant sought to overcome by introducing the ahistorical phenomenon-noumenon distinction and the a priori rationality of the knowing subject. Kafka brings this repressed antinomy to the fore by alluding to the despair occasioned by the constant and continuous slipping away of the concrete/real in the form of the castle or the applause for the hungry artist the more they are sought after (by K and the Artist in The Castle and The Hungry Artist respectively) to be known. Ultimate applause will be heaped on the hungry artist only after he has starved himself to death. But then he will not receive any of that applause because he wouldn’t any longer be there. Kafka hinted at this impossibility – which sharpens the modern finite human being’s ever-insatiable desire to overcome the impossibility into a fruitless obsession that he cannot rid himself of, thereby making the impossibility progressively keener – when he wondered in a diary entry whether the shoes and clothes in his closet were the same when he was not looking at them.

The sharply despairing apprehension of, nay confrontation with, such antinomies and paradoxes in Kafka ought to be ascribed to his Hasidic sensibility and its preoccupation with the idea of the invisible Jew. A preoccupation that has predisposed the Jews to believe the coming of the messiah is perpetually deferred.

The striving for the messiah that such sensibility and belief produces is, not surprisingly, always articulated as not yet, thereby tendentially implying that the messiah will come here within our given universe of the law where it cannot come yet, thanks to the counter-tendency inherent in this same striving. Clearly, the law cannot give way to the messianic unless the exception – the not-yet-but-yet-to-come of the messiah – which is constitutive of the law, is abolished thus also abolishing the law. The Pauline Christ-event of the moment of Christianity’s birth in and through Saint Paul’s epistolary interventions inaugurates – as shown by Alain Badiou and propagated by Slavoj Zizek – precisely such a new diachronic moment and movement. A moment of the actual arrival of the messiah in the shape of Jesus crucified and resurrected that is constitutive of a subtracted ‘lawless’ space outside and beyond the law and knowledge (as wisdom or doxa) , where it is not as if one doesn’t know or is being lawless but where one does not need to know or be subordinated to the law. That is because matter is, in such a situation, its own subjectivity, which otherwise would be open to beknown by a subject from its outside.

As for law, the existence of the subject in its singularity is its universal truth. Thus universality, in such a condition, is the auto-referentiality of the singular subject, which does not need to be designated and named as an ontology from a universalising outside termed the law. Clearly then, the condition of the subject’s singular existence is its law, which is negation of negation as a law that does not determine or designate the subject from the latter’s outside is an inversion of the logic of law and is thus not law at all. In the same vein, the subject is not a subject as it is not designated, determined and produced by law from its outside. Or, to be more accurate, it is named and produced by law that is not law. Since the subject is its own law, and the law its own object, what is named as the subject is only a provisional political naming of the trans-subjective at its one particular moment where it constitutes and expresses itself.

The law is constitutive of a condition that renders singular existence impossible by splitting the trans-subjective (or pure becoming), or the subject that expresses the trans-subjective at one finite moment of its many moments that constitute its infinity, into subject-object or universal-particular; or into heterogeneous strata of broken moments. In the Christ-event of Pauline Christianity, the messiah by actually arriving, abolishes the exception constitutive of the law and thus abolishes the law and its logic too. This is the path of, dare I say, anti-Judaic revolutionary politics, which produces a disjunction in the universe and discourse of the law to shift the ground of existence on to a space that is the logical inverse of the paradigm of law and law-produced being.

It is this that is missing in Kafka’s consciousness, thanks to it being grounded in the Jewish-Hasidic sensibility. And it is this Hasidism that is at the root of Kafka’s despairing optimism when he tells Max Brod that there is infinite hope “but it’s not for us (humans)”. This Jewish pessimism of Kafka articulates a tripartite schema wherein man is in between three conditions of being: the life of a burden of the law, which he is condemned to impossibly strive to be redeemed of; death that will extinguish the being that needs to be redeemed, rendering the question of redemption irrelevant; and, therefore, infinite hope outside of this life-and-death binary of a law-designated being. Such hope is vested in the figure of the messiah, whose arrival is always expected but perpetually deferred. This peculiar nature of the Jewish messiah, clearly, renders it into the negative exception to the given universe of the law – constituting it by making it possible and sustaining it.

Immanent in Kafka’s Jewish pessimism about the fate of ‘human beings’ is, however, the realisable possibility of a trans-human and trans-being existence. This immanent unconscious of Kafka’s Jewish consciousness, implicitly articulated by the tripartite schema we have extracted from him, is allegorically expressed by the actual coming of the messiah in Jesus, resulting in the rupture-like birth of Christianity from Judaism. The actual arrival of the messiah, as we have seen above, abolishes the exception of the yet-to-come-but-ever-not-here messiah and thus also ends up abolishing the given universe of the law and the existential condition of the law-designated, law-governed being. As a result, it also renders the fact of death of such a being into a redundant and meaningless idea. For, if within this horizon of non- or post-law the existence of being is not possible – because the pre-condition of being’s existence is the law – there can be no question of his death! The condition of life within this new horizon is the trans-human or trans-being condition. Christ’s second life, after he rises from the dead, is a metaphor of precisely such a trans-human life where the question of human death has been abolished, and rendered pointless and absurd.

This ‘Christian’ horizon is the horizon of Marxist revolutionary politics where one does not constantly and impossibly seek the yet-to-come-but-ever-not-here messiah, but where one is permanently restoring to the Church and its laws their originary and constitutive message and logic of messianic grace by, ironically enough, repeatedly decimating the churches and its laws. The death of a church of one moment is, within this horizon, not to be construed as the death of a being because what is preserved is the pure becoming or trans-subjectivity that formed that church but was also repressed by its reified institutionality. So, the death of a church (institution) of a moment, within this horizon, is the continuation of the trans-subjective life that was expressed in and by that church at that moment; but in so doing it also began threatening that life and therefore had to be destroyed to preserve the becoming-life that was constitutive of its existence. Within this horizon what lives is trans-subjectivity and the death of its one subjective expression of one particular moment is not a death because what lives through and in this apparent death, and matters, is the trans-subjectivity that also, dialectically speaking, lived in the coming-to-life of that church.

It is this immanence in Kafka’s riddles of the law and its exception, and the possibility that this immanence can be actualised, that drew the Marxist in Benjamin to the Czech-German writer. To that extent, Benjamin’s notion of Kafka, and his concomitant understanding of the writer’s work, was very different from the sense imputed to him by vulgar Communist Party-type Marxists and, ironically, even the anti-communist dissidents, who pride themselves as being votaries of a politics of high culture free from the exigencies and vagaries of politics proper. Both cherish Kafka for what they see as his depiction of the hapless everyman face-to-face with a bureaucratic and totalitarian behemoth. That can and must, of course, be read into Kafka. But such a reading would do justice to both Kafka’s aesthetic complexity and to a nuanced and effective counter-hegemonic politics only if the horror of bureaucratisation and totalitarianism are discerned in his work as a derivative and supplementary epiphenomenon of and within the essentially constitutive field of the law.

In that context, the case of Milan Kundera, especially his reading of Kafka, is a curious expression of the problem. Kundera, commenting on Kafka (and Hasek, Broch and Musil), writes: “…it would be wrong to read their novels as social and political prophecies, as if they were anticipations of Orwell! What Orwell tells us could have been said just as well (or even much better) in an essay or pamphlet.” Kundera is right when he argues Kafka ought not to be conflated with Orwell. His criticism of those Kafka scholars, who read in the Czech-German writer the description of man’s encounter with bureaucracy and totalitarianism, is entirely valid. And yet, Kundera’s reading into Kafka of the bureaucratisation and totalisation of every sector, nook, cranny and crevice of modern human society – indeed, the very soul of the human being – takes us only one step away from the descriptions of the manifest forms, artifacts and apparatuses of bureaucratisation that are constitutive of and central to the Orwellian reading of Kafka that Kundera rejects.

Instead of describing the congealed forms of bureaucratisation, Kundera finds in Kafka the situations that put those forms in a certain relation to one another. That is, at best, a more refined version of Albert Camus’ existentialist appropriation of Kafka. Kundera, thanks to his ‘situationist’ reading of Kafka, remains distant from Kafka’s central concern, which, to my mind, was to articulate the essential logic that constituted and was constituted by bureaucratic and totalitarian situations. In Kafka, situations are merely incidental epiphenomena of the essential logic. They thwart Kafka’s endeavour to efface himself so that language can emanate on its own from the non-lingual and the non-formal. In short, from the essence.

Kafka, the writer, is condemned to use language and thought to undermine language and thought themselves by attempting to capture the flux of the dialectical essence that lurks ghost-like in the depths of forms and concepts made possible by language. It is, as if, Kafka constantly conspires to set up a traumatic encounter of the symbolic (linguistic/conceptual/formal/situational) with the real, which is nothing but a trans-conceptual and/or formless dialectical logic constitutive of bureaucratic situations and orders. That is made manifest by the ‘unreal’ economy and sparseness of style in Kafka’s writing. This then is the impulse behind Kafka’s aesthetic of desiccation where the touch of the unsayable, as it were, has corroded and dried up language, thus rendering utterance barely possible.

Kafka wants the pure unbroken light – which is the visible, not the objects and forms this light congeals into – to express itself in just this state of its “unbroken-lightness”. He desires to free, as if anticipating Foucault and Deleuze, the visible from the threshold of the sayable and the linguistic. That is the reason why the language of Kafka’s prose, despite being made up of elements from the universe of human language, becomes nonsensical the moment one seeks to separate it from the reality of his prose, which this language embodies, to make sense of it as part of the sensible (and representational) human language proper. And yet, it is human language, or at any rate elements taken from it, that Kafka the writer can only resort to. Maurice Blanchot pins down this neurotic impossibility – or dialectic – in Kafka rather accurately: “…all Kafka’s texts are condemned to speak about something unique while seeming only to express its general meaning. The narrative is thought turned into a series of unjustifiable and incomprehensible events, and the meaning that haunts the narrative is the same thought chasing after itself across the incomprehensible like the common sense that overturns it. Whoever stays with the story penetrates into something opaque that he does not understand, while whoever holds to the meaning cannot get back to the darkness of which it is the telltale light. The two readers can never meet; we are one, then the other, we understand always more or always less than is necessary. True reading remains impossible.”

Thus Kundera’s discovery of the comic in Kafka is mistaken. Kafka’s novels and parables, to the extent they are linguistic forms and concepts, do certainly produce the comic effect. But that is as incidental as the situations that allude and simultaneously repress their essential constitutive logic. In fact, Kundera contradicts himself, sort of, when he discerns the tragic experience of the characters in Kafka’s texts at precisely those points that produce the comic effect for Kafka’s readers situated outside the texts. Clearly then, what matter in the Kafkan operation, as far as Kafka himself is concerned, is not the production of the effects of the comic or the tragic but a dialectic that reconciles, obliterates and, thereby transcends, the two. That is the logic Kafka wished to grasp and ventriloquisise, and not the situations or the effects that allude to it only to obscure and repress it.

Kafka’s concern, not unlike Marx’s, was to grasp and articulate the discursive logic constitutive of human history. We could almost imagine him closing the dialectical circuit – opened by Marx and Engels through the first sentence of The Manifesto of the Communist Party about “the history of all hitherto existing societies” having been “the history of class struggles” – by stating that the history of all hitherto existing human societies has been the inescapable domination of the human being by the equally inescapable law. While Marx’s historical optic of the class struggle enabled him to see and envisage the movement of history in terms of a diachronic succession of affirmative, law-unraveling moments that eradicated the law-produced ‘beingness’ of the human condition and the question of its death to posit the immortality of the trans-human or pure and infinite human-becoming, Kafka’s gaze grazed over those struggles to only see the law that is inevitably re-produced in the division of movements into people and the state. For Kafka then, struggle against the law to go beyond it is impossible and meaningless as beyond the law there is more law. Struggle against the law is immanent in Kafka’s pessimistic consciousness only as its unhappy unconscious.

Now, to come back to the attraction Kafka held for Benjamin, we would do well to attend to the latter’s discovery of the concept of gestus in operation in the former’s conception of fragments of one’s self. That, as far as conceiving the structure of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary subjectivity goes, is a rather productive opening. Gestus, according to Fredric Jameson following French etymology, is both a gesture and an epic. What it means, for Benjamin, and also Brecht, is a particular fragment of a totalised self, embodied in one of its many gestures, and the singular totality of such a fragment whereby the fragment becomes a whole unto itself. We should, however, be attentive to how Kafka positions those fragments vis-à-vis his total self. We should be careful not to conflate what, in my view, is Kafka’s consciousness of the gestus – fragments of a self as particularities and/or negative Judaic exceptions to the totality of the manifest self in question that, as a consequence, reinforce that self and its coercive and false totality – and what is immanent in it, which would complete the etymological and also politico-aesthetic dialectic of the concept. To blindly follow Benjamin on Kafka, without recognising the productive tension in the ambiguities of his Judaic-Marxism, could be disastrous. And yet, it’s only the encounter with and awareness of such tensions that can enable the illumination of the real trauma in Kafka’s soul and aid the production of an authentic revolutionary subjectivity.

 Rich Gibson

I wrote the paragraph below for an essay in Cultural Logic, published on September 6th, 2001:

From time to time in the St. Clair River, which runs rapidly along the eastern coast of Michigan connecting Lake Huron with Lake St. Clair, a combination of high winds and atmospheric pressure causes the river to split apart, leaving a wet marsh between an onrushing tide of water headed south, and a trailing wave of great power. The locals call this a seiche, and the long moments that pass as the broken water surges to connect with itself, usually accompanied by dark purple skies, they call the seiche time. Perhaps this is the seiche time, the murky purple space between powerful waves, moments of great upheaval and crisis, the time when what is most sensibly linked appears to be forever disconnected: people from their work and the products they make, their love, and from one another; theory from practice, language from life, the parts from the whole, and social justice from equality, democracy, care, and inclusion.

The consummate leader cultivates the moral law (Sun Tzu)

The seiche time ended with the whirlwind five days later, the terrorist billionaire’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the empire’s response invading Afghanistan, then Iraq, the bi-partisan suspension of civil liberties, expansion of surveillance and force, and, finally, the economic collapse linked not merely to the dislocation of finance and productive capital, what Lady Astor called, “running off higgledy-piggledy,” from industry, but also the bloated costs of war itself (NY Times, 100 Candles for a Darling of Society, 30 March 2002).

In US schools, a long seiche of slow preparation to regain full control of those who prepare the next generation of workers, teachers, following the war in Vietnam swept into hyper-speed with the No Child Left Behind Act, regimenting the curricula, replacing the minds of school workers with the minds of profiteers, enforcing with racist anti-working class high-stakes exams, invading the schools with divisions of militarists preaching witless nationalism.

Today, the empire stands exposed, or so it should be, as morally bankrupt, driven by greed alone, fully corrupt at every level, unwilling and unable to meet fundamental human needs – jobs to health care to education and all in between. The USA has been fought to a standstill in Iraq by an enemy with no long history of resistance, no internal defense industry of note, no definable external supply lines, no clear chain of command or central leadership. The US military is losing in Afghanistan, as did 300,000 Soviets before them. The best the US could hope for would be a somewhat tamed Taliban rule, giving in to the madmen, and fully isolating the Al Qaida terrorists. Then, in 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, a key US ally, and the US did nothing. Next, a joint Israeli/US force attacked the imprisoned people of Gaza, killing hundreds, a horror the entire world recognized, laying waste to whatever post-Katrina and Iraq US reputation existed.

A nation of people who went shopping on the urging of President Bush, as trade-off for perpetual war, sees its rising expectations crushed with a foreclosure crisis, national and personal debt crises, while banksters at CitiGroup try to buy $50 million jets with federal bailout money. Inequality booms. 2.7 million people lost jobs in 2008 in the US. 600,000 lost jobs in December 2008 alone. 45,000 people lost jobs on January 26, 2009. Those jobs were in every key sector of the economy demonstrating the acceleration and breadth of unemployment. The public sector threatens layoffs, payment in script, speed up, demands for concessions, and tax hikes while services, libraries to garbage pickup to health care and pensions, are eradicated. It’s a worldwide collapse of the giant Ponzi scheme that operated in the international company store of capitalism. In some countries like Mexico, only drug money and remissions hold the economy together.

Elites are insulated, isolated. Their political campaigns are advertising campaigns, winners fixed by who spent most (Obama outspent McCain three to one on tv ads; despite the wreckage of the Bush administration, the election was no landslide though turnout was the highest in 40 years; race remained key. 55% of white people voted McCain).

The REAL vote went on in regard to the bank bailouts; overwhelming public opposition despite a full-scale media assault to portray the bailout as a rescue. But the government, nothing but an executive committee of the rich, and their armed weapon, is going to bail itself-the united banksters and their pols, on the grounds that we are all in this together when we are not at all in this together. That today’s voters do not recognize the nature of the government, yet they overwhelmingly oppose this transparent robbery, is indicative of the problem we face in pedagogy and practice – a gap that needs to be crossed.

City politicians and governors from New York to California queue up for jail cells, facing corruption and morals charges – hookers and toe-tappers. The last moral compass for the country is TV’s Judge Judy, the second richest woman in the US. And, clearly enough, this is all the work of people, not Nature, nor gods. It is class war, an international war of the rich on the poor.

These are the ingredients for social upheaval, revolution (Johnson, 1982). But there is no rise of revolutionary analysis, action, or even talk in the US. To the contrary, the population, fickle and hysterical, having turned on the once beloved George Bush to the favors of a father figure and demagogue, Obama, is at a loss about what is up, why things are as wrong as they are, what to do, why, and what would replace our multiple dilemmas. The election built nationalism, not reason.

All morons hate it when you call them a moron (Holden Caulfield)

And why is that? There is no left. Following the largest world wide anti-war demonstrations in history, what claims to be the US left squandered potential and set about developing tactics in the absence of strategy, dodged the responsibility of making a clear moral and ideological stand that all could hear, failed to teach people that we are responsible for our own histories (if not our birthrights), and today lies split between factions (The Communist Party USA’s front, United for Peace and Justice, ANSWER, the National Assembly, etc,) all ducking terms like capitalism, imperialism, class struggle, and above all, revolution. The left has no analysis, no strategy, no tactics, no profound moral call for equality and freedom, and no succinct, easily grasped, ideology.

We are lambs among wolves. We do not have to live as lambs among wolves.

It would be easy to blame the post-modernists. Postmodernism, religion with an angry cloak, raised every narrow identity, every neurosis, ever standpoint of what was really a tiny capital, to a central issue beyond critique, worthy of worship (Breisach, 2003). Finally and predictably, it became ego over solidarity. Academic post-modernists became priests of a whine from the ivory tower, at base a whine about the vanishing of professorial protections and privileges. Postmodernism atomized academia even further than its usual state – minds crouched in little individual warrens hoping for a hint of notice, and it influenced the left, forming a kind of reincarnated right-wing Menshevism. But the very real promise of perpetual war is clearly upending the lofty dream of “changing the discourse,” and, I hope, will have the hidden benefit of killing postmodernism which tried to disconnect past, present, and future; deservedly giving this Versace-clothed corpse a secret burial where it can never be found again – maybe in one of those mystical “spaces” or “interventions,” it enjoyed so much.

Still, there is no left.

I blame the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the Communist Parties of the world who never understood Marx and his undying belief that people could be creative, passionate, caring, more or less free by living equitably in matters of production, reproduction, and decision making. Marx investigated not merely the capitalist system, but recognized the possibility that people could be whole, human, by demolishing it, retaining what was useful about it, and moving to a higher level, going beyond capital; becoming whole, transcending alienated life, in revolution.  This sets up Marx’s ethic of equality and mutual care that was quickly forgotten by Bolshevism and socialism in general, sacrificed on the altar of speeding production.

Nor did the Bolsheviks grasp Marx’s maxim, “criticize everything.”  Behind a veil of internal discipline, they recreated the slavish belief: Do what you’re told. Bolshevism lost interest in forging a mass base of class-conscious people. The historical critique of tyranny, rule through deceit, custom, hierarchy, and assassination – and voluntary servitude – going back to the first slave and, in writing, back beyond the Greeks, vanished under Bolshevism (La Boetie, 1997; Jaszi and Lewis, 1957).

The failures of Bolshevism (and its inheritor, Stalin) set up the failures of the last century, now spilling into both of today’s anti-war movements and the educational justice movements, repeating the grotesque Bolshevik errors (mechanical materialism;  re-establishing the values and production practices of the bourgeoisie; supporting bogus national movements that the Bolsheviks opportunistically pegged “the new subject,” and thus inherently revolutionary when they were just nationalists; abolishing the idea of class struggle;  propping up “good” bosses while they claimed to fight “bad” ones; claiming that truth lay within the central committee when truth is always slightly beyond us; in promoting the idea that Bolshevism would have to create abundance in order to share it out and that abundance could only be fashioned by capitalism so socialism became capitalism with a party promising future benevolence which would never happen;  personality cults; transforming inner party debate to invective and murder to the point it was impossible for the party to self-correct; in abolishing the negation of the negation in philosophy and thus negating the idea of revolution, in betraying what they said they said they set out to do and becoming what they claimed to oppose). And all that was repeated in school social movements like the sixties’ Students for a Democratic society and it is repeated today by the very same people, some – the self-proclaimed Weathermen like the infamous opportunist Billy Ayers – once liberals with bombs, now reformers who say they can do school reform without engaging fundamental social change, or people who think they can reason and write their way out of capitalism. Now the anti-war movement, whose face is the Communist Party’s United For Peace and Justice, is a funnel for the Democratic Party, and the education reform movement still thinks it can teach its beyond the social relations required by capitalism.

First, those who agree with me that the greatest possibility in the US and much of the world is the emergence of a mass, popular, fascist movement with millions of people marching to its tune, will have to forgive me for saying that I am not going to write about what would need to be done. Political conditions inside the fading US capitalist democracy and the Patriot Act today make that unwise. Like everyone who ever faced a true historical crisis, as we do today with economic collapse interacting with growing realities of endless war (economic collapse that may well be only resolved by endless war, popularized by a war-means-work mentality) what peers back at us from the future is something entirely new. Perhaps it is overblown or a recognition of my own limits to say I know of no historical precedent for our predicament. Hence, on the darker side of guessing that we may be surrounded by a hostile population for some time, I suggest studying the early days of the Vietnamese revolution, Michael Collins, and Chinese perseverance in the Long March.

However, I bet against my better judgement and write here with greater hope on the chance we might help derail that ugly prospect with a four legged project: Reason, Passion, Power, and Organization, in the context of saying, again, we are lambs among wolves. We face a real crisis in which our opposition, which I propose is mainly the US ruling class, which exists, has a determined central command, weapons, two centuries of experience with exclusion and deception, the habits and traditions of everyday life on their side, and has demonstrated repeatedly that they are prepared to spill rivers of blood. They also stand naked as strategically incompetent, tactically inept – which may mean they are in the long term, weak, but in the short term, desperate and scary.

Even so, educators have phenomenal potential power. We are tasked to investigate ideas, we occupy key positions in society, connecting multiple communities, and we can quickly understand that a good part of social change is pedagogical, linking reason to power.

On the matter of reason, I want to apply Marx’s maxim, “criticize everything”, to capitalist democracy and the failure to follow Marx’s path by nearly every reform group, and Bolshevik remnant, in the world. I also hope to apply reason to social analysis and the development of strategies and tactics. So, I will investigate abstract democracy, capitalist democracy, and the fetish the left has made of democracy in the US.

Expanding on Che Guevara, who, when he witnessed the US sponsored violent overthrow of the democratically elected Arbenz regime in Guatemala, said, “It was then I left the path of reason,” I say we must see more paths than reason alone.

On matters of Passion, I want to investigate what it is that the left has failed to demonstrate to people about Marx’s view about being whole, equitable, creative, caring, even friendly – and how we desperately need to build that into our organizations now, before the vision is lost in the thousand forms of selfishness that make class rule possible. I will suggest that one impact of the dramatic expansion of finance capital, dominating productive industrial capital, and the parallel de-industrialization, has been the acceleration of the collapse of the family, once central to inhibition against change, and, thus, the acceleration of the ruling class call to educators to fashion, not just fear of the outer cop, but to instill the inner cop, the inner priest, via the regimentation of the curriculum and high stakes exams (Schneider, 1975).

Reason must be connected to passion if we are to change peoples minds, carry out any pedagogical project, but especially the one at hand that connects the struggle in education to society.

On organization and power, or organized action, I want to quickly review where the Rouge Forum – which I assert is the core of the left in the US – is and where I think we need to be.

Let us begin with Abstract Democracy, and quickly toss away the abstract pretense of democracy standing by itself.

Here are three telling quotes about Democracy:

Democracy is the name we give the people whenever we need them. – Marquis de Flers Robert and Arman de Caillavet

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois. – Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880)

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right. – H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)

We can see how US democracy deals with popular Hamas, crushes democratically elected regimes it does not like as in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Chile, seeks to murder popular leaders like Castro, creates bogus democratic movements in accompaniment with the CIA as in Kosovo or Poland, promotes democracy in the USSR and calls the KGB leadership “democracy advocates,” restores drug gang warlords in Afghanistan and calls that democracy, invades and Balkanizes Iraq, for oil and regional control while waiving the democratic flag, and props up tyrants like the Saudis all over the world. Democracy is less than meaningless, actually inverted, in the outer reaches of the empire. The US uses the National Endowment for Democracy as a front for the CIA all over the world, and inside the US as well, to destroy indigenous movements that fight for equality.

Internally, US democracy, often with liberals in the lead, fashions the theft of the public treasury in maneuvers like Enron or the trillion dollar bankster bailouts which involved every sector of government, demolishes the environment and gets the citizens to pay for the superfund sites, cheats at the ballot box, as in 2000, how the rich use the sheer power of their money to deceive and exclude people in national elections which now measure, not so much vote counts, but who spends the most. Obama betrayed his own promise to rely on public funds.

Democracy relies on a tax system that forgives the rich their riches and punishes workers for having to work. Greek democracy and US democracy were stacked on slavery. US democracy is an untrustworthy privilege won through the plunders of vicious imperial violence, part of the buy off of the population of the empire’s citizens, just as the nationalist loyalty of top union leaders is purchased by the CIA. US abstract democracy sits on the false idea that we are all in this nation together, when we writhe in the midst of class warfare, our side losing for now (Moore, 1957; Szymanski, 1978).

The one place we might expect to see some kind of abstract democracy operating, in the unions, we witness the most grotesque perversions of abstract democracy, as in the American Federation of Teachers or the United Auto Workers unions, both functioning with a caucus system that locks out nearly any dissent whatsoever, a system upheld by the democratic Supreme Court. Union democracy is a myth. The unions, decidedly a part of the system of capital, are reduced to capital’s motive: chase the dues money (Gibson, 2006).

Governors, whoremongers and corrupt, line up for prison cells, from New York to Illinois. Every big city in the US is polluted with political corruption, from Mayor Kilpatrick’s disgrace in Detroit to Mayor Murphy’s disgrace in San Diego, just as the cities were utterly corrupt 100 years ago, as Lincoln Steffens demonstrated in Shame of the Cities, but Steffens was never able to connect incidents of corruption and the necessary tie of a system of exploitation and buy-offs, so he treated each city’s rot as a fluke, just as Jonathon Kozol continues to do with education reform today, calling for “democracy.”

When US anti-war activists in the Vietnam era wanted to organize a vote against the war, they arrogantly forgot about the Vietnamese vote taking place on the battlefield.

Plunkett of Tammany Hall begat Randy “Duke” Cunningham. The 2008 election spectacle is cost more than one billion dollars, for TV ads alone. The offer was with the Clinton versus Obama dogfight, two demagogues declaring they can out-superstition the other and one war criminal, McCain. Such is abstract democracy in the US, serving at best as something of a warning signal to the ruling class (Szymanski, 1978).

In philosophy, abstract democracy is religion, dialectics without materialism, the dead end of critique, a source of class rule. You suspend your critical thought, agree to one Imaginary Friend or another, enter an arena run by self appointed translators for the IF, pay them, accept the hierarchies they created before you arrived, take direction and adopt the rules of the translators for the IF, and since your IF has to expand or collapse, and since there is no way to resolve religious disputes, no way to offer proofs, others become enemies. Rivers of blood.

I do not want to hear about abstract rule of the people. Rather than vote in this system, the best move might be to turn the tables and, instead of buying a politician, get some pals and collectively sell your votes. I dismiss the abstraction of democracy.

I do want to address capitalist democracy which Marx described as the best fit for the social system when under expansion. To grasp the relation of capital and democracy we must understand that they are not piled, one on the other, but fully imbued with each other. They developed together in history. It is like a mathematical fraction in which the numerator exists as a full partner with the denominator. But it, capitalism and democracy, is a zipped up relationship that is ignored or denied in civics classes, and which can ebb and flow depending on power relations between classes. We know US democracy can vanish, fast, as in Detroit in 1967 when all laws were suspended and the military invaded the city. The same is true of Canada, with the War Measures Act enforced in 1970.

Capital is the all-dominating power of bourgeois society (Marx)

What, then, is capitalism? It is, first, a system of exploitation, a giant sucking pump of surplus labor, a relentless quest for profits in which those who do not expand, die, as with the US auto industry. Capitalism is born in inequality and violence. Those who own, stole, and the rest, who must work to live, work under an unjust condition that claims to give us a fair day’s pay, when in fact that days pay begins with the violence of being dispossessed and ends with our being paid but a portion of what our labor creates – the source of profit. Over time, production becomes increasingly social, yet the value of that production is looted by those few who hold power and capital. Still, at least in theory, the revolutionary system of capital which demolished feudalism (then gave it new life in the Taliban) creates a world in which all people could live fairly well, if they shared.

So, capitalism is a system of exploitation in which those who must work to live must vie with each other for jobs, while nation based owners vie with each other for cheap labor, raw materials, and markets, often using militaries made up of workers who are sent off to fight the enemies of their real enemies: the rich at home.

Capitalism is a system rooted in Alienation and Exploitation: People who must sell their labor to live; that is, the vast majority of people, are drawn together in systems of production which, over time, are more and more socialized (bigger plants, more interconnected forms of exchange, technology, and communication, etc).

However, the people who must work, who form a social class, are set apart from each other in competition for jobs and do not control the process or the product of their work. We see that as school layoffs prompt educators to point at one another, suggesting someone else should go first, while the curriculum and teaching methods are imposed from the top down. Kids really need more educators, not less, and corporate profits and CEO pay still boom.

While we have more control over our time as educators than most workers, we do not determine how the work will be done, nor do we choose what will be done with the product and don’t own the profits gained (whether it is a Pinto of child or a chocolate). The more they engage in this form of exploited work, the greater the difference between them and their employers grows. At the same time, the more workers labor, the more they enrich their rulers, and wreck themselves. Alienation is a loss of self, indifference to others and a surrender to passivity. Each group forms, in essence, a competing social class, hence Marx says, “history is the history of class struggle.” Alienated individuals, though, become increasingly isolated while, simultaneously, they are driven together in ever more distinct, separated, classes. At the end of the day, the alienated person is split from him/herself; self-destructive.

Alienation and exploitation lead to Commodity Fetishism: Capitalism is propelled, in part, by the sale of commodities, for a profit (as in surplus value). Over time, both workers and the employer class relate more to things than they do to other people, indeed people begin to measure their worth by commodities, especially the chief commodity, money, which in many instances becomes an item of worship. Businesses no longer focus on making, say, steel for use, but on making money, for profits. Education becomes, not leading out, as from the Greek, but for domination and test scores become the fetish.

Finance capital begins to dominate industrial investment, or such is the path in the US. People who must sell their labor become commodities themselves, and often view themselves and their own children that way. How much you make determines who you are, who you meet, who you marry, where you travel. You are not what you are, but what you have.

People then begin to see what are really relations between people, as relations between things (every human relationship mainly an economic one), which leads to the connection of commodity fethishism and reification. In discussing the stock market, most economists treat it as if it had a wisdom and life of its own (remember the religion metaphor). In schools, children have been routinely commodified, sold to companies like McGraw-Hill (textbooks) and Coca Cola – and most teachers would agree that this process has accelerated in the last decade. Commodification means that people become things, less human, less connected so Marx argued, “the more you have, the less you are.”

Test scores remain a good example.  No Child Left Behind sets up an appearance of equality, just like the myth of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. The myth is that children enter the testing room as equals, the harder they prepped, the better they will do. The reality is that the more their parents earn, the higher the scores. The more you are concerned about test scores, the less you are learning anything important; the more you are learning, for example, subservience.  In school the battle for profits meets the battle for social control.

As with capital, the more you concentrate on test scores, the more stupefied you become. But, the politicians ask, “how else can we measure learning?” while masses of people forget we could just ask the kid. Or, if we are truly so concerned about testing and scores, why not give the kids the test on the first day of school and keep giving it, with reflective instruction, until all pass?

War, on one hand, and unconcern, on the other, are results of commodity fetishism. Greed, domination and fear are the underlying ethics, underpinned by indifference, the opposition of love.

Combined these three processes, exploitation, alienation, and commodity fetishism forge reification: All reification is a form of forgetting (Horkheimer-Adorno). The relations of people, disguised as the relations between things, become so habitual that it seems natural. Things people produce govern peoples’ lives. Commodity production and exchange are equated with forces of nature. “Natural laws,” really inventions of people, replace real analytical abilities (as in seeing supply and demand, or scarcity and choice, as the centerpieces of economics, rather than seeing economics as the story of the social relations people create over time in their struggle with nature to produce and reproduce knowledge, freedom, and life – or in political science, discussing democracy as if it had nothing to do with social inequality).

Reified history is abolished, capitalism assumed to be the highest attainable stage of human development. Nothing changes. Normalcy in some capitalist countries is really store-bought assent to exploitation – masked as freedom. Test scores are good examples of reification in school. Measuring little but parental income and race, test scores are worshiped uncritically, influencing peoples’ live far beyond their real value. Real estate salespeople love test scores, churn the market.

Reification hides the system of compulsion and disenfranchisement, a push-pull from the powerful, that mystifies a social system of exploitation so thoroughly that it is able to seriously call itself a centripetal point of freedom, producing a mass neurosis so powerful that it encourages it subjects to steep in two decades of consumerist euphoria while their social superstructure, like schools, their social safety net, like welfare or health services, evaporated underneath them.

Their industrial base vanished as well – a hangover from euphoria, the Golden Calf becoming the Trojan Horse – not wise for a nation promising to wage meat grinder perpetual wars on the world to have the steel industry owned by outsiders from India, Germany and Japan. One has to worry about what happens when this population cannot use its play stations or get to the mall. They may be the most dangerous people in the history of the world.

These processes of capital give those who own an enormous machine for lying and deceiving, a massive propaganda machine extending from all forms of media into schools, throughout the military, etc.

This background sets up our look at capitalist democracy as the best system for capital as it expands. The capitalist state is an executive committee of the rich, not an autonomous neutral, but their debate forum where they iron out their differences, then allow the vast majority of people to choose which of them will oppress best. The capitalist democracy is also an armed weapon in service to property rights. As the ruled far outnumber the rulers, and since coercion and force alone cannot sustain capitalist production, to pacify areas people must be turned into instruments of their own oppression.

We can see now how the one-person-one vote mythology would appeal both to rulers who seek to divide and conquer, and to individuals isolated by the system of alienation, fooled by the atomizing deception apparatus that promotes individualism – voting promotes the lowest forms of opportunism, boils down to “what about me?” – and the false notion that a vote can bring fundamental social change. The vote count serves as a warning signal to ruling classes.

People hide from one another in voting booths wrongly thinking they are making real public decisions when they really have no control over the processes and products of the system – and most cynically know politicians always lie – yet they vote thinking they are exercising their only public or social power, when in fact they are just setting themselves off from others and the reality is that their real power lies in unity with other workers – at work, their ability to build solidarity to fight to control the value they create. The crux of capitalist democracy is revealed in the fact that nearly no one expects to have a vote on anything significant at work, unless they own the workplace.

Others, excluded (by Jim Crow laws or chicanery) might be disgruntled, while those who don’t vote can be attacked for being responsible for the bad choices voters make.

Fundamentally powerless student councils are practice areas for future political leaders, councils where all concerned pretend they have influence, when they are mere performers reading blank scripts. Student councils are sandboxes. When university presidents see the kiddies inching outside the sandbox, the presidents (or principals) abolish the vote and push the kids back in.

The rule of law, which appears to be natural law, law suspended above and apart from class struggle, is a form of reification. On the face of it, justice, but at base it is class rule and, moreover, the rule of law is key to commerce – mutual trust is hardly enough, indeed, laughable.
The masses of people are told this is the law, which is alienated law, “the will of the ruling class exalted into statutes,” (Marx), a sandbox of property laws overseen by millionaire judges that only incidentally considers people. The mythological rule of law is sheer class rule that shifts as class struggle and largess or bankruptcy meet one another.

Within this law, as in religion, people deepen their alienation, choose, and pay, others to think and act for them, others who operate behind the habits of hierarchy and the force of arms. When serious differences, collisions of interests, appear between the capitalists of a given nation, they conduct civil war. The base for capitalist law is the same as the capitalist ethic: Profits are good, losses are bad, keep a careful count. Capitalist law is the law of property, ownership, not humanity.

The religion metaphor works well with schooling in the industrialized world. In the abstract, as with abstract democracy, public schools are there for the common good. But they are capitalist schools, above all, while, granted, opposition exists in some ways like it does in a factory. Educators in capitalist schools are somewhat like missionaries for capitalism. Look at the hierarchies: men run the administration (Bishops), and women (Nuns) do the front line work. School workers, who have more freedom than other workers, have a clear choice, be a missionary for the system of capital-or not.

No one ever voted themselves out of what is, at base, a Master/Slave relationship. The Masters will never adopt the ethics of the slaves. The singular path of reason alone will not overcome the system of capital, though reason must be our light and beacon. Our choice today is between community and barbarism.

Marx was correct in seeing that capitalism is a giant worldwide company store, an international war of the rich on the poor, and most importantly that the dispossessed of the world, probably all of us, have a real interest in overcoming that system and, not replacing it with another form of dictatorship, but with an ethic and reality of reasonable equality.

The people’s insurrection is against tyranny (Grachus Babeuf)

The logic of the analysis of capitalist democracy leads directly to revolution. There is no other way out. While we should abhor violence, we should not reify it, treat it as if abstract violence stands on a plane similar to abstract democracy, beyond history, social conditions, or the legitimate arts of resistance. We should not celebrate hatred, no shy away from it. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

The logic of revolution against capital is true especially now when finance capital in the US, now in free fall yet continuing to expand, is challenged by capital in other nations, like China which has a well motivated, not exhausted, military and needs that oil just as much as the US. Oil moves the military, which in turn is absolutely key to any empire’s ability to flourish, which is why saving gas will do little or nothing about the perpetual oil wars. US finance capital is hit by the crises we are familiar with: the mortgage, personal debt, and national debt crises the ghastly rise in food and transportation costs, and so on. Harsh times came fast following the collapse of Lehman Bank and we witnessed the merger of finance and government with the series of bailouts, welfare to the rich, as the usual privatization of profits melded with the socialization of losses.

It follows that capitalist democracy in the US is not expanding with the Obama election, but rapidly contracting, and fascism emerges. As class antagonism grows, state power becomes an ever more national power over labor and reforms with capital only increase the power of its state. There are no more labor laws of any worth, no civil rights laws, habeas corpus, rights of privacy, free speech (remember, “watch what you say”) are gone, through bi-partisan legislative action as well as the courts.

The fight-back to transform the system of capital needs to look carefully at the rise of fascism (merger of the corporate and political elites, suspension of common laws, racism, nationalism, a culture writhing in violence in search of a strong leader-all moving at hyper speed within the national election now). Saying “emergence of fascism,” does not mean fascism is arrived, but it does mean that fascism exists for some people in the US now, say a young black man in Detroit or Compton, while it is appearing before the eyes of others-volunteers drafted by the economy in Iraq.

The recent election should not only be studied as how to choose who will best oppress the majority of the people from the executive committee of the rich, the government. It should be studied, more importantly, as how an element of capitalist democracy, the preposterous election, has speeded the emergence of fascism, that is,
*the corporate state, the rule of the rich,
*the suspension of civil liberties,
*the attacks on whatever press there is,
*the rise of racism and segregation (in every way, but especially the immigration policies),
*the promotion of the fear of sexuality as a question of pleasure (key to creating the inner slave), and the sharpened commodification of women (Sarah Palin to pole dancers),
*the governmental/corporate attacks on working peoples’ wages and benefits (tax bailouts to merit pay),
*intensification of imperialist war (sharpening the war in Afghanistan sharpens war on Pakistan which provokes war on Russia, etc, and the US is NOT going to leave Iraq’s oil),
*the promotion of nationalism (all class unity) by, especially, the union bosses),
*teaching people the lie that someone else should interpret reality and act for us, when no one is going to save us but us,
*trivializing what is supposed to be the popular will to vile gossip, thus building cynicism -especially the idea that we cannot grasp and change the world, but also debasing whatever may have been left of a national moral sense,
*increased mysticism (is it better to vote for a real religious fanatic or people who fake being religious fanatics?) and,
*incessant attacks on radicals (Bill Ayers is not a radical; he is a foundation-sucking liberal now, once he was a liberal with a bomb, but people see him as the epitome of a radical and he IS connected to Obama).

That is a litany of the acceleration of fascism (Gibson, 2000).

Al Szymanski (1978:212) outlined the basic functions of the capitalist state three decades ago. This is a reminder:
1. To guarantee the accumulation of capital and profit maximization and make it legitimate.
2. Preserve capitalist class rule.
3. Raise money to fund the state.
4. Form and preserve capitalist class rule.

But the left of the US anti-war movement, and the education reform movement, abandoned the critique of capitalist democracy, meaning they have no basis for analysis, no ability to develop strategies and tactics across a nation or even in unique communities – because they do not grasp how power works or why it is that the power of people who work lies, not in the voting booth – where odds are the voting machines are owned by their enemies – but at work where they can collectively win control of the processes and products of their work, in communities, or in the military where the working classes are already organized and armed.

At the same time, the left has made a fetish of Abstract Democracy, following the postmodernist coalitions where the notion of class struggle or the word, capitalism, is banished and people are urged to go off in narrow race/nation/sex/language, “autonomous,” grouplets taking up their constricted issues, as did the 10,000 people meeting in Atlanta in 2007 at the World Social Forum, thinking this will somehow lead to real resistance to a ruthless enemy with a long history of rule and a centralized command. The WSF created no strategy at all. To quote America’s last remaining moral compass, Judge Judy, “it doesn’t make sense and it is just not true.” It won’t work. Judge Judy is a perfect example of the appearance of judiciousness, when it is really the application of the values of the bourgeoisie, and the sale of judiciousness, as the filler between commercials.

Inside the trap of Abstract Democracy, a tyranny with a thousand hierarchies and forms of selfishness each uniting the individuals with the whole of capital, the left has shown it is unable to get its ideas to leap ahead of daily social practice, and absolute necessity if we are to envision a better world and set about creating it.

In order to make a fight, people must trust one another. That means they must meet with each other in integrated groups that recognize that class remains the key issue at hand, of course mediated by questions of race, language, sex, gender, nation.

That, coupled with its unremitting captivation with nationalism, is the main reason the US left has had no impact whatsoever on the last seven years of imperialist war, even though a million and more people hit the streets in the first week of the Iraq invasion. They evaporated into their semi-autonomous worlds and have not exercised their potential power since. A somewhat similar thing happened to the school reform movement which, other than parts of the Rouge Forum, simply refuses to address the connections of the system of capital, imperialism, war, the regimentation of school life and the curriculum, oversight through high stakes exams, militarization, and privatization as well.

It is fair to say, I think, that the dominant elements of public life in the US are opportunism, racism, nationalism, ignorance, and fear (surely that is true of the professorate) though we have to recognize that the sheer persistence of continuing to work, in our case on behalf of kids, has considerable courage built into it.

Anyone interested in confronting our conditions today must follow Hegel’s dictum: “The truth is in the whole.” The whole is capitalism. Some live in capitalist democracies, and most do not, but it is the whole that must always be addressed, like keeping the front sight aligned with the rear sight. Even reforms will not be won without both sights on the target. The failure to create a mass base of class conscious people, which is our life and death high stakes test, remains the Achilles Heel of nearly every social movement. It follows we need to openly talk about what capitalism is, why class struggle takes place, what can be done, and what a better future might be. We need to answer the question: What do we want people to know, and how do we want them to come to know it? – inside every action we take.

Let us soar on to passion. A great part of the school reform movement, of the anti-war movement, of the Marxist project, is pedagogical. Do people learn through reason alone? They do not.

The entire system of capitalist democracy is a system of deceit, misrepresentation, and although it may seem as if anyone can see what is up, few do. What constructs mistaken consciousness, what underpins the indifference, the “whatever,” that keeps the system going, or, what reveals the Man Behind the Screen, or, what causes some people to acquiesce while others resist, even knowing they won’t soon win?  Engels said there is no simple connection between being, the system of capitalist social relations, and consciousness, or class consciousness (Schneider, 1975:24)

Consider the impact of capitalist democracy on capitalist schooling, it’s purportedly public system which is, in fact, several segregated systems conducting education mostly along the lines of the race and class, a pre-prison program in Detroit, a pre-Walmart program in National City, a pre-social worker program in LaMesa, a pre-law system in Lajolla, and a private system in Bloomfield Hills where the rich send their kids like Mitt Romney and George Bush. In Romney’s school, youth learn the view, “this is our world and we will discover how we might make it act,” while elsewhere, depending on the rung of the segregated ladder, kids learn, “tell me what to do and I will do it.”

Capitalist schooling in the US, since the multidimensional decay ushered in by the Vietnam war, has taken the place of the family in the social breaking in of the future work force through marching kids inside a system of inhibition, suppression, prohibition, in which society seizes control of childhood, and I think significantly, tries at once to make kids asexual, fearful of sexual pleasure, and thus their own bodies, while the outside world introduces them, ceaselessly, to spectacles of exploitative sexuality. Aids on the one hand, Brittany Spears on the other. Is it any wonder that 1/4 of our teens have std’s?

Capitalist schooling imbues kids with the idea that it is natural to have to sell yourself, your labor, and then, through high-stakes exams for example, teaches kids the thousand forms of selfishness that make class rule possible (Schneider, 1975:22). As Wilhelm Reich said, the inner cop is the Trojan Horse of any society rooted in domination. And Marx was clear that capitalism reduces love and passion to cash – Elliot Spitzer, Randy Cunningham, etc. But money is not an early childhood wish. Human connection is. But the connection is broken in a broken world.

It is illegal in US capitalist schools to teach the central issues of life: Labor (involving the communist movement), rational knowledge (opposing the many Imaginary Friends that people think are in charge), love (tied to pleasure, sensuality, aesthetics, as well as reproduction), and freedom (which does not exist in school life).

With Bob Apter and Susan Harman, I traveled California last fall, meeting with teachers, parents, kids, and community people all over the state, the northern border to the Mexican border. The main thing we learned: Fear is the primary lesson being learned by everyone connected to schools. Lessons learned in fear teach, for the most part, abuse and more fear. We know the abused commonly turn around and abuse. Empathy linked to passion may transform that, or not.

The idea that we are responsible for our own histories, if not our birthrights (inheritance seen as natural), is banned in most capitalist schooling, as is the viewpoint, true, that we can comprehend and change the world. To the contrary, children are taught lies (nationalism for example) using methods so obscure that kids learn to not like to learn, a dubious achievement of capitalist schooling.

We know the education-by-commands-and-fear NCLB’s child victims can be restored to life to some extent by good, persevering, teaching, but it is a terrible burden to overcome. For the most part, NCLB works teaching obedience, servility, and nationalism, eradicating history to the point that Chalmers Johnson (2006:2) claims people in the US, “have no framework to link cause and effect.”

The NCLB sets up the three processes driving school today: (1) the regimentation of the curricula and methods of instruction, (2) surveillance through racist, anti-working class exams using a pretense of science to sort children, and (3) militarism, a veritable invasion of the schools in poor and working class areas while all are taught the normalcy of endless warfare.

In this context, how do we connect reason to passion? I think we do that, in part, by addressing the fact that freedom is insight into unfreedom, that we must sacrifice our narrower interests in order to participate collectively, but beyond that we must build passion, friendship, caring, empathy, aesthetics, and as much freedom as possible into a resistance group addressing the whole of the problems of the system of capital.

That does not mean we need to take on Abstract Democracy. It means we must find ways to make collective decisions about serious actions for the common good. It does not mean lowest common denominator consensus building, nor the isolation of voting. It means a resistance group based on reason, friendship, and figuring out how to make the best decisions possible.

Opportunists have no principles, ethics, and lots of friends who know nearly nothing important.
Sectarians have rigid principles and no friends; generals without armies. Marxists have lots of friends yet keep their principles, ethics, intact, and seek to teach others – combining ethics, action, and empathy for those who must live in fear – as many educators do.

We need to find ways to allow people to be as fully human, celebratory, as possible, connected, each demonstrating their creativity and connectedness with unfreedom as a commonly understood problem to be solved, because we are lambs among wolves.

It is this condition that can allow us to connect passion to the willingness to sacrifice that fundamental change, or any important social change now, will require to create and sustain. This is not going to be easy. This path beyond reason demands that people sacrifice treasure, sleep, sometimes jobs, certainly time and promotions, maybe jail or life, for the common good. Without that sacrifice, which can be achieved with collective joy, nothing.

We must not promise ourselves a future of material abundance. That will not happen. The ruling classes will destroy their own factories, hospitals, and even the water supply. What can transport us to a world where people can share is the idea that we might have to share misery for awhile because, per Marx, ideas can be a material force – and have been.

This brings us to organization, power and action.  Surely we can see that justice demands organization. The Rouge Forum changed the discussion in the education reform movement. Our insistence on the role of capital, on class struggle is best illustrated by Wayne Ross’ immortal comment interrupting a particularly boring executive committee meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies: “Hey, this is a lot of nonsense. We Need To Read Marx and Make Class War!”

We have had a dramatic impact on academic historians, whole language specialists, the critical pedagogy crowd, and the k12 world as well. The conversation always has to, at worst, worry about us saying, “Now wait a minute.” We ruptured the habits of daily academic life that only reproduces the system of capital, diminishing all it touches.

The Rouge Forum brought together people throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Great Britain, and India within an organization that has grasped, for eleven years, that it is possible to have an organization, be friends, and be both critical and self-critical. We united parents, kids, school workers, and community organizers.

We predicted both these wars, what became the NCLB as early as 1997, the economic collapse, and published much of the initial research on the real impact of NCLB in academic and popular journals. We were among the first to plan ways to fight it. We traveled the US and other nations pointing out the centripetal power of educators in de-industrialized nations, among the last workers who have health benefits or predictable wages.

We organized and led direct actions in workplaces and communities like the high-stakes test boycotts in Michigan, Florida, New York, and California. We did not just breach discourse and habits, we disrupted the unjust social relations in schools, shutting them down and, in very limited ways, offered youth freedom schooling. We marched on Mayday before the massive immigrant Mayday marches of 2006, and happily joined those huge outpourings of the working class when they took place. Now, with Calcare and others, we participate in a mass opt-out campaign, hoping to lead test boycotts to cut the school to war pipelines. We are building a base of thinking activists inside and outside the unions to reject the coming demands for school worker concessions, teaching people how to strike in solidarity – and to supply the Freedom Schools that can show how the future might be.

We reminded everyone that the key to understanding the 20th century is understanding revolution.

We have operated loosely. It worked for about ten years, with about 4600 people steady on our email lists, our yearly conferences, our publications, our joint work with Substance News, Calcare, the Whole Language Umbrella, and Susan Ohanian.

What we do counts now more than ever. Events move even more quickly than my comment at the Rouge Forum conference in 2008 that the sky is falling. We need to take that purposefully and plan the resistance with care.

We are lambs among wolves. Kindness, reason, organization, must prepare to meet those willing to spill-rivers of blood.

We can win. To quote the classic labor song, Solidarity Forever:

“In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.”

Down the banks and Up the rebels! And don’t forget to smash the state.
Rich Gibson is an associate professor of Social Studies in the College of Education at San Diego State University. He helped to found the Rouge Forum.

References

Babeuf, G. (1794). Acte Insurrecteur (Act of Insurrection).

Breisach, Ernst (2003). The Future of History, The Postmodern Challenge and its Aftermath (2003, University of Chicago Press).

Fischer, E. (2005) How to Read Karl Marx. South End Press. NYC (source of Marx quote p163).

Gibson, R. (2006). The Torment and Demise of the United Autoworkers’ Union, Cultural Logic.

Gibson, R. (2000). What is fascism?

Horkheimer and Adorno (2002). Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.

Johnson, Chalmers (2006). Nemesis, the Last Days of the American Republic. Metropolitan Books. New York.

Johnson, Chalmers (1982). Revolutionary Change (second edition). Stanford University Press.

La Boetie, E. (1997) The Politics of Obedience, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Black Rose Books, New York.

Jaszi, O., and Lewis, John (1957) Against the Tyrant. The Free Press, USA.

Moore, S (1957) Critique of Capitalist Democracy. Paine-Whiteman, NYC.

Salinger, J.D. (1976). Catcher in the Rye. Bantam Books. NYC. (source of Caulfield quote is chapter 6).

Schneider, M. (1975). Neurosis and Civilization. Seabury Press. NYC.

Sun Tzu, (unknown date) The Art of War.

Szymanski, Al (1978) The Capitalist State and the Politics of Class. Winthrop Publishers, Cambridge, Massachusetts.