[Thivai: Excellent short essay -- discusses neoliberalism here and abroad, through the lenses of David Harvey, Timothy Mitchell and Naomi Klein. Would be a great intro for people that are not familiar with neoliberalism or political economy or broader global interconnections or problems with free market/privatization in a real world setting.]
A revolution against neoliberalism? If rebellion results in a retrenchment of neoliberalism, millions will feel cheated.
by Abu Atris
Al Jazeera
...
Rhetoric vs. reality
Two observations about Egypt’s history as a neoliberal state are in order. First, Mubarak’s Egypt was considered to be at the forefront of instituting neoliberal policies in the Middle East (not un-coincidentally, so was Ben Ali’s Tunisia). Secondly, the reality of Egypt’s political economy during the Mubarak era was very different than the rhetoric, as was the case in every other neoliberal state from Chile to Indonesia. Political scientist Timothy Mitchell published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in his book Rule of Experts (the chapter titled "Dreamland" — named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by the fall of the regime). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were applied unevenly at best.
The only people for whom Egyptian neoliberalism worked "by the book" were the most vulnerable members of society, and their experience with neoliberalism was not a pretty picture. Organised labor was fiercely suppressed. The public education and the health care systems were gutted by a combination of neglect and privatization. Much of the population suffered stagnant or falling wages relative to inflation. Official unemployment was estimated at approximately 9.4% last year (and much higher for the youth who spearheaded the January 25th Revolution), and about 20% of the population is said to live below a poverty line defined as $2 per day per person.
For the wealthy, the rules were very different. Egypt did not so much shrink its public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite. Privatization provided windfalls for politically well-connected individuals who could purchase state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monopolise rents from such diverse sources as tourism and foreign aid. Huge proportions of the profits made by companies that supplied basic construction materials like steel and cement came from government contracts, a proportion of which in turn were related to aid from foreign governments.
Most importantly, the very limited function for the state recommended by neoliberal doctrine in the abstract was turned on its head in reality. In Mubarak’s Egypt business and government were so tightly intertwined that it was often difficult for an outside observer to tease them apart. Since political connections were the surest route to astronomical profits, businessmen had powerful incentives to buy political office in the phony elections run by the ruling National Democratic Party. Whatever competition there was for seats in the Peoples’ Assembly and Consultative Council took place mainly within the NDP. Non-NDP representation in parliament by opposition parties was strictly a matter of the political calculations made for a given elections: let in a few independent candidates known to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2005 (and set off tremors of fear in Washington); dictate total NDP domination in 2010 (and clear the path for an expected new round of distributing public assets to "private" investors).
Parallels with America
The political economy of the Mubarak regime was shaped by many currents in Egypt’s own history, but its broad outlines were by no means unique. Similar stories can be told throughout the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Everywhere neoliberalism has been tried, the results are similar: living up to the utopian ideal is impossible; formal measures of economic activity mask huge disparities in the fortunes of the rich and poor; elites become "masters of the universe," using force to defend their prerogatives, and manipulating the economy to their advantage, but never living in anything resembling the heavily marketised worlds that are imposed on the poor.
Unemployment was a major grievance for millions of Egyptian protesters [EPA]
The story should sound familiar to Americans as well. For example, the vast fortunes of Bush era cabinet members Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, through their involvement with companies like Halliburton and Gilead Sciences, are the product of a political system that allows them — more or less legally — to have one foot planted in "business" and another in "government" to the point that the distinction between them becomes blurred. Politicians move from the office to the boardroom to the lobbying organization and back again.
As neoliberal dogma disallows any legitimate role for government other than guarding the sanctity of free markets, recent American history has been marked by the steady privatization of services and resources formerly supplied or controlled by the government. But it is inevitably those with closest access to the government who are best positioned to profit from government campaigns to sell off the functions it formerly performed. It is not just Republicans who are implicated in this systemic corruption. Clinton-era Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin’s involvement with Citigroup does not bear close scrutiny. Lawrence Summers gave crucial support for the deregulation of financial derivatives contracts while Secretary of Treasury under Clinton, and profited handsomely from companies involved in the same practices while working for Obama (and of course deregulated derivatives were a key element in the financial crisis that led to a massive Federal bailout of the entire banking industry).
So in Egyptian terms, when General Secretary of the NDP Ahmad Ezz cornered the market on steel and was given contracts to build public-private construction projects, or when former Minister of Parliament Talaat Mustafa purchased vast tracts of land for the upscale Madinaty housing development without having to engage in a competitive bidding process (but with the benefit of state-provided road and utility infrastructure), they may have been practicing corruption logically and morally. But what they were doing was also as American as apple pie, at least within the scope of the past two decades.
However, in the current climate the most important thing is not the depredations of deposed Mubarak regime cronies. It is rather the role of the military in the political system. It is the army that now rules the country, albeit as a transitional power, or so most Egyptians hope. No representatives of the upper echelons of the Egyptian military appear on the various lists of old-regime allies who need to be called to account. For example, the headline of the February 17th edition of Ahrar, the press organ of the Liberal party, was emblazoned with the headline "Financial Reserves of the Corrupt Total 700 Billion Pounds [about $118 billion] in 18 Countries."
A vast economic powerhouse
But the article did not say a single word about the place of the military in this epic theft. The military were nonetheless part of the crony capitalism of the Mubarak era. After relatively short careers in the military high-ranking officers are rewarded with such perks as highly remunerative positions on the management boards of housing projects and shopping malls. Some of these are essentially public-sector companies transferred to the military sector when IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs required reductions in the civilian public sector.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Showing posts with label Neoliberalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neoliberalism. Show all posts
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Crisis and Resistance in the Neoliberal City : A Conversation with David Harvey, Max Rameau, Shiri Pasternak, and Esther Wang
Crisis and Resistance in the Neoliberal City : A Conversation with David Harvey, Max Rameau, Shiri Pasternak, and Esther Wang
Indy Reader
David Harvey: This foreclosure crisis, this financial crisis, has to be thought of as a crisis of the city, a crisis of urbanization – and if it’s a crisis of the city and of urbanization, then the solution has to be a reconfiguration of the city and a redirection of what urbanization is about. The pattern of this crisis is not anything new; and one of the things that happens in the U.S., and on the left in general, is that we seem sometimes to suffer from amnesia as to what has happened in the past. I would like to recall that the last biggest crisis period of capitalism, from around 1973 to 1982, was a deep crisis of urbanization. It began with the collapse of global property markets in the spring of 1973, leading to the bankruptcy of several financial institutions, followed of course by the Arab-Israeli war and the oil price hike (which everybody remembers more than they remember the property market crash). This was followed by a crisis of municipal finance and the disciplining of almost all cities, not only in the U.S., but around the world, to a new regime of financial terror, what I’d also call “neoliberal politics.” Understanding what this regime was about is crucial because it was part of the solution to the crisis of the 1970s, a solution which underpins the nature of the crisis we are currently in. This is a terribly important point to make, because how we come out of this crisis is almost certainly going to define the nature of the next crisis down the road – unless we decide to say, “To hell with capitalist crises! To hell with capitalism!”
In the 1970s it was clear that corporate America was in difficulty, economically and politically. Economically, it decided to try to get out of it by confronting and disciplining labor, big time, and it had a number of means to do that. First, it opened up immigration, for instance the 1965 Immigration Reform Act in this country. It’s very interesting to remember that in the 1960s and the 1970s the Germans were importing people from Turkey, the French were actually subsidizing bringing in immigrants from the Maghreb, Britain was of course accepting people from the ex-empire, and the Swedes were bringing in people from Yugoslavia. Immigration became one of the capitalist class’ main tools to try to solve the “problem” of the power of labor, the scarcity of labor, and the high level of wages. Second, they tried to use technological change to throw people out of work as much as possible, through labor-saving innovations. The third was the invention of interesting politicians with names like Reagan and Thatcher, whose main mission was of course to screw labor and destroy labor organization – they did it democratically while Pinochet did it through military violence in Chile. And finally if this political assault on labor didn’t work you could always offshore production to Mexico or the Philippines or Bangladesh or ultimately even to China.
By all these means, capitalists successfully disciplined labor in the 1970s and early 1980s, such that by the time you get to 1985 the labor question is no longer a serious barrier to capitalist accumulation. What that meant however, was that labor had very little power in the market, and as a result of that, real wages did not increase anywhere in the world, even in the United States, from the 1970s to the present day. We’ve been through 30 years of wage repression, guaranteeing capitalist profits, with a public policy which was actually oriented in that same direction. I always remember that Margaret Thatcher’s economic advisor said in effect, sometime after he left the postion, that he really believed that the fight against inflation was really a cover to bash the workers and create an industrial reserve army so that capitalists could have easy profits ever thereafter.
What we’ve seen since then is of course a tremendous increase in inequality and a tremendous concentration of wealth in the upper classes. The story we’re told is that the upper classes should have that wealth, after all, they invest, and as they invest they create jobs and aren’t-we-all-grateful-to-them-for-doing-so. The idea that we could actually get jobs by other means is ruled out of the picture, of course. But in fact the capitalist class doesn’t particularly care about creating jobs, it cares about making money. And it soon found, in the 1980s in particular, that it could make money by investing in asset values rather than in production, so it started to invest in the stock market, in property markets, in oil futures and so on. New markets were developed in which you could actually make even more money than you could spending your money on assets through purchasing derivatives of assets – and very soon you could buy on derivatives of insurances of derivatives of assets and so on.
What resulted was a financial asset bubble, rather than at real expansion of production and real jobs. The rest of us were reduced very frequently to service functions, reconfiguring the class structure. We went through deindustrialization in this country, through a reconfiguration of the nature of job structures and also of the kinds of people who can occupy those job structures. This was crucial to fueling the bubble that grew in the 1990s in particular. During that period, if you asked where to put your money, you were told to put it in property markets. It’s important to remember that we’ve had many financial crises over these last thirty years, and many of those crises have been related to urbanization, and have been about property. We had the Savings and Loans crisis in 1987-89, when somewhere around 600 or 800 banks or financial institutions were declared bankrupt, and this was a crisis tied very much to commercial property. In 1992 the Swedish banking system went bankrupt over excessive property development. In 1989 the Japanese economy crashed around land market prices. What we’ve had is a whole series of asset bubbles and we seem to forget what these asset bubbles are about. These asset bubbles are like Ponzi schemes: people put money in the stock market, the stock market rises, and people put more money in the stock market, and it just keeps going like that, the same with property markets, the same with oil futures. And this leads us to a point where, finally, the asset bubble breaks. It breaks big time this time, not like it did in 1987, which was sort of contained, but in a much bigger way, that becomes global immediately, as the 1973-75 crisis was global. That then poses the problem: what exactly are we going to do about this?
Now the answer to this lies in the way we came out of the crisis in the 1970s, when the New York investment banks acquired vast quantities of money from recycling petro dollars. Their big problem was where to invest it–the economy wasn’t doing well, so where do you put your money to make a sufficient rate of return? One of the things they decided on was lending to developing countries–because the good thing about lending to countries is that countries can’t disappear, you know where they are and you know you can go get your money. So in the 1970s they lent to places like Mexico. Then they raised the interest rates and Mexico couldn’t pay, and was going to go bankrupt–which meant that the New York investment banks could go bankrupt. So at that point, the government stepped in, the treasury and the IMF got together, and they bailed out Mexico so that Mexico could bailout the New York banks. But they bailed out Mexico in such a way that the Mexican population suffered a drop in living standards of about 20% in the next two to five years. This is what’s called saving the banks and socking it to the people.
Now I defy you to look at what’s been going on in this country in terms of its public policy and say its anything other than saving the banks and socking it to the people. We’re the ones who are paying, they are the ones who are benefitting. This is a class project, it was a class project back in the 1970s and it continues to be one now. If we come out of this crisis with this class project intact then we are in deep trouble. We have to turn it around in such a way that government policy gets turned into support of the people, not support of the banks. The banks should be nationalized, turned into public utilities which serve people, not capital. And this is something on which we really need to concentrate our ideas on, right now. In particular, the biggest danger of all is that the stimulus package which is being passed is going to be handed out to mayors, handed out to cities, handed out all over the place, in such a way that there is absolutely no control over exactly what’s going to be done with it. So what’s going to be done with it is that people are going to be use it to fund their favorite projects. Mayor Bloomberg’s favorite project is to give $45 million to retrain Wall Street executives, which seems to me an astonishing way in which to spend the money – but that’s the way Mayor Bloomberg thinks. But I think we have different ideas; in New York, together with the some of the social movements who are forming the Right To The City group, we would like to suggest a whole different set of ways the stimulus package could be spent in order to benefit people rather than capital. Along with that, we have the supreme irrationality that you have tent cities arising in California and elsewhere, increasing homelessness, at the same time that you have all these vacant properties around. Is that a rational situation? And it seems that this is a situation where political activism can take very direct action–for instance, Picture the Homeless in NYC tried to commandeer a building last week–and this is the kind of thing we need to be supporting publicly as much as we can.
To Read the Rest of the Panel Discussion
Indy Reader
David Harvey: This foreclosure crisis, this financial crisis, has to be thought of as a crisis of the city, a crisis of urbanization – and if it’s a crisis of the city and of urbanization, then the solution has to be a reconfiguration of the city and a redirection of what urbanization is about. The pattern of this crisis is not anything new; and one of the things that happens in the U.S., and on the left in general, is that we seem sometimes to suffer from amnesia as to what has happened in the past. I would like to recall that the last biggest crisis period of capitalism, from around 1973 to 1982, was a deep crisis of urbanization. It began with the collapse of global property markets in the spring of 1973, leading to the bankruptcy of several financial institutions, followed of course by the Arab-Israeli war and the oil price hike (which everybody remembers more than they remember the property market crash). This was followed by a crisis of municipal finance and the disciplining of almost all cities, not only in the U.S., but around the world, to a new regime of financial terror, what I’d also call “neoliberal politics.” Understanding what this regime was about is crucial because it was part of the solution to the crisis of the 1970s, a solution which underpins the nature of the crisis we are currently in. This is a terribly important point to make, because how we come out of this crisis is almost certainly going to define the nature of the next crisis down the road – unless we decide to say, “To hell with capitalist crises! To hell with capitalism!”
In the 1970s it was clear that corporate America was in difficulty, economically and politically. Economically, it decided to try to get out of it by confronting and disciplining labor, big time, and it had a number of means to do that. First, it opened up immigration, for instance the 1965 Immigration Reform Act in this country. It’s very interesting to remember that in the 1960s and the 1970s the Germans were importing people from Turkey, the French were actually subsidizing bringing in immigrants from the Maghreb, Britain was of course accepting people from the ex-empire, and the Swedes were bringing in people from Yugoslavia. Immigration became one of the capitalist class’ main tools to try to solve the “problem” of the power of labor, the scarcity of labor, and the high level of wages. Second, they tried to use technological change to throw people out of work as much as possible, through labor-saving innovations. The third was the invention of interesting politicians with names like Reagan and Thatcher, whose main mission was of course to screw labor and destroy labor organization – they did it democratically while Pinochet did it through military violence in Chile. And finally if this political assault on labor didn’t work you could always offshore production to Mexico or the Philippines or Bangladesh or ultimately even to China.
By all these means, capitalists successfully disciplined labor in the 1970s and early 1980s, such that by the time you get to 1985 the labor question is no longer a serious barrier to capitalist accumulation. What that meant however, was that labor had very little power in the market, and as a result of that, real wages did not increase anywhere in the world, even in the United States, from the 1970s to the present day. We’ve been through 30 years of wage repression, guaranteeing capitalist profits, with a public policy which was actually oriented in that same direction. I always remember that Margaret Thatcher’s economic advisor said in effect, sometime after he left the postion, that he really believed that the fight against inflation was really a cover to bash the workers and create an industrial reserve army so that capitalists could have easy profits ever thereafter.
What we’ve seen since then is of course a tremendous increase in inequality and a tremendous concentration of wealth in the upper classes. The story we’re told is that the upper classes should have that wealth, after all, they invest, and as they invest they create jobs and aren’t-we-all-grateful-to-them-for-doing-so. The idea that we could actually get jobs by other means is ruled out of the picture, of course. But in fact the capitalist class doesn’t particularly care about creating jobs, it cares about making money. And it soon found, in the 1980s in particular, that it could make money by investing in asset values rather than in production, so it started to invest in the stock market, in property markets, in oil futures and so on. New markets were developed in which you could actually make even more money than you could spending your money on assets through purchasing derivatives of assets – and very soon you could buy on derivatives of insurances of derivatives of assets and so on.
What resulted was a financial asset bubble, rather than at real expansion of production and real jobs. The rest of us were reduced very frequently to service functions, reconfiguring the class structure. We went through deindustrialization in this country, through a reconfiguration of the nature of job structures and also of the kinds of people who can occupy those job structures. This was crucial to fueling the bubble that grew in the 1990s in particular. During that period, if you asked where to put your money, you were told to put it in property markets. It’s important to remember that we’ve had many financial crises over these last thirty years, and many of those crises have been related to urbanization, and have been about property. We had the Savings and Loans crisis in 1987-89, when somewhere around 600 or 800 banks or financial institutions were declared bankrupt, and this was a crisis tied very much to commercial property. In 1992 the Swedish banking system went bankrupt over excessive property development. In 1989 the Japanese economy crashed around land market prices. What we’ve had is a whole series of asset bubbles and we seem to forget what these asset bubbles are about. These asset bubbles are like Ponzi schemes: people put money in the stock market, the stock market rises, and people put more money in the stock market, and it just keeps going like that, the same with property markets, the same with oil futures. And this leads us to a point where, finally, the asset bubble breaks. It breaks big time this time, not like it did in 1987, which was sort of contained, but in a much bigger way, that becomes global immediately, as the 1973-75 crisis was global. That then poses the problem: what exactly are we going to do about this?
Now the answer to this lies in the way we came out of the crisis in the 1970s, when the New York investment banks acquired vast quantities of money from recycling petro dollars. Their big problem was where to invest it–the economy wasn’t doing well, so where do you put your money to make a sufficient rate of return? One of the things they decided on was lending to developing countries–because the good thing about lending to countries is that countries can’t disappear, you know where they are and you know you can go get your money. So in the 1970s they lent to places like Mexico. Then they raised the interest rates and Mexico couldn’t pay, and was going to go bankrupt–which meant that the New York investment banks could go bankrupt. So at that point, the government stepped in, the treasury and the IMF got together, and they bailed out Mexico so that Mexico could bailout the New York banks. But they bailed out Mexico in such a way that the Mexican population suffered a drop in living standards of about 20% in the next two to five years. This is what’s called saving the banks and socking it to the people.
Now I defy you to look at what’s been going on in this country in terms of its public policy and say its anything other than saving the banks and socking it to the people. We’re the ones who are paying, they are the ones who are benefitting. This is a class project, it was a class project back in the 1970s and it continues to be one now. If we come out of this crisis with this class project intact then we are in deep trouble. We have to turn it around in such a way that government policy gets turned into support of the people, not support of the banks. The banks should be nationalized, turned into public utilities which serve people, not capital. And this is something on which we really need to concentrate our ideas on, right now. In particular, the biggest danger of all is that the stimulus package which is being passed is going to be handed out to mayors, handed out to cities, handed out all over the place, in such a way that there is absolutely no control over exactly what’s going to be done with it. So what’s going to be done with it is that people are going to be use it to fund their favorite projects. Mayor Bloomberg’s favorite project is to give $45 million to retrain Wall Street executives, which seems to me an astonishing way in which to spend the money – but that’s the way Mayor Bloomberg thinks. But I think we have different ideas; in New York, together with the some of the social movements who are forming the Right To The City group, we would like to suggest a whole different set of ways the stimulus package could be spent in order to benefit people rather than capital. Along with that, we have the supreme irrationality that you have tent cities arising in California and elsewhere, increasing homelessness, at the same time that you have all these vacant properties around. Is that a rational situation? And it seems that this is a situation where political activism can take very direct action–for instance, Picture the Homeless in NYC tried to commandeer a building last week–and this is the kind of thing we need to be supporting publicly as much as we can.
To Read the Rest of the Panel Discussion
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Revolution By the Book: Academic Repression -- Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex
Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex
Peter McLaren (Editor), Steven Best (Editor), and Anthony J. Nocella, II (Editors)
Revolution By the Book
...
Neoliberalism and Academia
It was not paranoia that led John Dewey in the 1940s to warn that a corporatization process had begun whereby universities learned to shape and pattern themselves on a business model driven by the need to compete and turn education into a profit-making enterprise. Nor was it delusional when, in 1961, President Eisenhower warned that the “military industrial complex” posed a threat to the balance of powers and to civil liberties. The fusion of warfare, capitalism, science, and technology cannot take place without knowledge, advanced technologies, and a low-cost labor base, such as one finds ready-made in universities and their graduate student labor pools. Where science, engineering, and technology are crucial to capitalist militarism and militarist capitalism, universities form the third leg in a triadic system of postmodern power. It is a telling fact that the US spends more in the military sector than the rest of the world combined.
Consequently, deconstructing fictitious humanist ideals, describing the real goals and imperatives of “higher learning,” and delegitimizing the power systems that actually run universities, many theorists during the last two decades understood that the boundary lines between universities, corporations, and military/warfare/social policing systems were dissolving. They no longer saw three separate, unrelated entities, but rather one gigantic industrial complex. The term “academic-military-industrial complex” is shorthand for the intersection, overlapping, and implosion of universities, the corporate private sector, the Department of Defense and various armed forces services, and the security and regulatory apparatuses of the State—all knotted together in a vast, predatory bureaucratic system developed for social and geopolitical domination.1/2 By the 1990s, certainly, the questioning of scientific epistemology took on a far broader and more consequential term with critical scrutiny of the university institution itself, by charting the transformations of the mission and function of universities in the post-war era. Building on attacks on the politics of knowledge driving university research, a number of radical theorists, such as Stanley Aronowitz, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Sandra Harding, and numerous contributors to this book analyzed how the nobler purposes and missions of universities and institutions of “higher learning” became corrupted and degraded. Hence, a spate of important new critical works emerged deconstructing the mythology of higher education and the academy as an institution.
As capitalism changes, so must education, and the rise of science and technology to dominant “productive forces” in the postindustrial phase of capital transforms education increasingly from a focus on humanities to narrow functional knowledge. The noble functions of higher education such as inculcating critical thinking skills, identities as citizens and members of interdependent communities, and the ability to meaningfully participate in and shape a democratic form of government gave way to reconfiguring the university as a corporation, ideological state apparatus, and technical school for training laborers.
Universities had become part of the “one dimensional society” (Marcuse), they had the potential to devastatingly criticize and overturn in favor of richly educated, highly cultured, autonomous citizens. Increasingly, the humanities and liberal arts were eclipsed by science, chemistry, mathematics, agriculture, geology, engineering, marketing, business, accounting, advertising, and other fields including sports. The economic rationale to increase university profits and functional purpose of producing individuals trained for science, technology, and business had the ideological bonus of homogenizing thought and stifling critical thinking. And under conditions of economic recession such as began to devastate global markets in 2008, universities have to tighten budgets and reduce or eliminate “superfluous” knowledges. Simultaneously, students increasingly turn toward practical realities of careers and economic survival and forego the “luxury” of studying literature, philosophy, or art, fields that regardless are grossly underfunded as they occupy the bottom rung of budgetary priorities. As the 2008–2009 crisis worsened, plunging much of the globe into recession and depression, worried students fall in line with corporate academic policies that reduce or eliminate “superfluous” humanities requirements in order to peddle degrees in marketable careers.
Partly due to economic constraints and partly because of the growing hegemony of technoscience, it is hard to miss the implosion between universities and vocational schools that eliminate liberal arts requirements and do little more than job training and indoctrinating students with capitalist values of competition, individualism, materialism, greed, and so on. Vocational schools such as Phoenix University are themselves corporate behemoths with branches spread throughout the US like fast-food chains. Indeed, on the neoliberal-consumerist model of education, knowledge is nothing but information to be consumed as quickly as possible, a sugary pabulum as injurious to the health of the mind as Whoppers and Big Macs are to the life of the body. In a society organized around work, productivity, and maximal exploitation of labor, no one has time for a satisfying meal let alone a genuine education, and the “slow food” movement ought to be linked to a drive toward a “slow education” that allows students the time and leisure to think and mature as human beings in pursuit of autonomy rather than in the service of capital.
As corporations, universities were interested in buying materials, investing in research and projects, inventing and patenting new technologies or advances in science and medicine, and competing on the marketplace. In fact, by the 1980s and 1990s, universities and society as a whole were becoming increasingly corporatized, marketized, and globalized. Acting like capitalists committed to the tyranny of the bottom line, universities began the cut-and-slash tactics that Reagan took to social programs in the 1980s, for a profitable enterprise cannot have excess costs, and labor expenses must be minimized. The dynamic that led to the restructuring of universities along corporate lines stemmed from aggressive neoliberal policies. The laissez-faire spirit of early capitalism was revived as neoliberalism, in order to dismantle welfare states, trade barriers, environmental regulations, and anything that stood in the way of trade. Universities moved in consort with the social, political, economic, and military systems that were changing the nature of the world through an aggressive neo-imperialism policy that was part and parcel of neoliberal attempts to subjugate the entire world to corporate power and market logic, while hopefully reviving a moribund American Empire.
Following the dominant corporate model, universities initiated a “de-skilling” of labor, and replaced the skilled labor of faculty with technology.3 Compliant with the needs of businesses and an overworked labor force, and updating higher learning for the age of the Internet, universities began to offer “long-distance learning” such that students could earn a degree at home through correspondence, with “teachers” reduced to functionaries who grade quantitative exams, raising the specter of a future university system that dispenses with teachers altogether in favor of computerized grading machines.4 “Increasingly,” Ollman writes, “university life has been organized on the basis of a complex system of tests, grades, and degrees, so that people know exactly where they fit, what they deserve, what has to be done to rise another notch on the scale, and so on. Discounting—as most educators do—their negative effects on scholarship, critical thinking, and collegiality, these practices have succeeded in instilling a new discipline and respect for hierarchy.”5
To Read the Rest of Excerpts
Peter McLaren (Editor), Steven Best (Editor), and Anthony J. Nocella, II (Editors)
Revolution By the Book
...
Neoliberalism and Academia
It was not paranoia that led John Dewey in the 1940s to warn that a corporatization process had begun whereby universities learned to shape and pattern themselves on a business model driven by the need to compete and turn education into a profit-making enterprise. Nor was it delusional when, in 1961, President Eisenhower warned that the “military industrial complex” posed a threat to the balance of powers and to civil liberties. The fusion of warfare, capitalism, science, and technology cannot take place without knowledge, advanced technologies, and a low-cost labor base, such as one finds ready-made in universities and their graduate student labor pools. Where science, engineering, and technology are crucial to capitalist militarism and militarist capitalism, universities form the third leg in a triadic system of postmodern power. It is a telling fact that the US spends more in the military sector than the rest of the world combined.
Consequently, deconstructing fictitious humanist ideals, describing the real goals and imperatives of “higher learning,” and delegitimizing the power systems that actually run universities, many theorists during the last two decades understood that the boundary lines between universities, corporations, and military/warfare/social policing systems were dissolving. They no longer saw three separate, unrelated entities, but rather one gigantic industrial complex. The term “academic-military-industrial complex” is shorthand for the intersection, overlapping, and implosion of universities, the corporate private sector, the Department of Defense and various armed forces services, and the security and regulatory apparatuses of the State—all knotted together in a vast, predatory bureaucratic system developed for social and geopolitical domination.1/2 By the 1990s, certainly, the questioning of scientific epistemology took on a far broader and more consequential term with critical scrutiny of the university institution itself, by charting the transformations of the mission and function of universities in the post-war era. Building on attacks on the politics of knowledge driving university research, a number of radical theorists, such as Stanley Aronowitz, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Sandra Harding, and numerous contributors to this book analyzed how the nobler purposes and missions of universities and institutions of “higher learning” became corrupted and degraded. Hence, a spate of important new critical works emerged deconstructing the mythology of higher education and the academy as an institution.
As capitalism changes, so must education, and the rise of science and technology to dominant “productive forces” in the postindustrial phase of capital transforms education increasingly from a focus on humanities to narrow functional knowledge. The noble functions of higher education such as inculcating critical thinking skills, identities as citizens and members of interdependent communities, and the ability to meaningfully participate in and shape a democratic form of government gave way to reconfiguring the university as a corporation, ideological state apparatus, and technical school for training laborers.
Universities had become part of the “one dimensional society” (Marcuse), they had the potential to devastatingly criticize and overturn in favor of richly educated, highly cultured, autonomous citizens. Increasingly, the humanities and liberal arts were eclipsed by science, chemistry, mathematics, agriculture, geology, engineering, marketing, business, accounting, advertising, and other fields including sports. The economic rationale to increase university profits and functional purpose of producing individuals trained for science, technology, and business had the ideological bonus of homogenizing thought and stifling critical thinking. And under conditions of economic recession such as began to devastate global markets in 2008, universities have to tighten budgets and reduce or eliminate “superfluous” knowledges. Simultaneously, students increasingly turn toward practical realities of careers and economic survival and forego the “luxury” of studying literature, philosophy, or art, fields that regardless are grossly underfunded as they occupy the bottom rung of budgetary priorities. As the 2008–2009 crisis worsened, plunging much of the globe into recession and depression, worried students fall in line with corporate academic policies that reduce or eliminate “superfluous” humanities requirements in order to peddle degrees in marketable careers.
Partly due to economic constraints and partly because of the growing hegemony of technoscience, it is hard to miss the implosion between universities and vocational schools that eliminate liberal arts requirements and do little more than job training and indoctrinating students with capitalist values of competition, individualism, materialism, greed, and so on. Vocational schools such as Phoenix University are themselves corporate behemoths with branches spread throughout the US like fast-food chains. Indeed, on the neoliberal-consumerist model of education, knowledge is nothing but information to be consumed as quickly as possible, a sugary pabulum as injurious to the health of the mind as Whoppers and Big Macs are to the life of the body. In a society organized around work, productivity, and maximal exploitation of labor, no one has time for a satisfying meal let alone a genuine education, and the “slow food” movement ought to be linked to a drive toward a “slow education” that allows students the time and leisure to think and mature as human beings in pursuit of autonomy rather than in the service of capital.
As corporations, universities were interested in buying materials, investing in research and projects, inventing and patenting new technologies or advances in science and medicine, and competing on the marketplace. In fact, by the 1980s and 1990s, universities and society as a whole were becoming increasingly corporatized, marketized, and globalized. Acting like capitalists committed to the tyranny of the bottom line, universities began the cut-and-slash tactics that Reagan took to social programs in the 1980s, for a profitable enterprise cannot have excess costs, and labor expenses must be minimized. The dynamic that led to the restructuring of universities along corporate lines stemmed from aggressive neoliberal policies. The laissez-faire spirit of early capitalism was revived as neoliberalism, in order to dismantle welfare states, trade barriers, environmental regulations, and anything that stood in the way of trade. Universities moved in consort with the social, political, economic, and military systems that were changing the nature of the world through an aggressive neo-imperialism policy that was part and parcel of neoliberal attempts to subjugate the entire world to corporate power and market logic, while hopefully reviving a moribund American Empire.
Following the dominant corporate model, universities initiated a “de-skilling” of labor, and replaced the skilled labor of faculty with technology.3 Compliant with the needs of businesses and an overworked labor force, and updating higher learning for the age of the Internet, universities began to offer “long-distance learning” such that students could earn a degree at home through correspondence, with “teachers” reduced to functionaries who grade quantitative exams, raising the specter of a future university system that dispenses with teachers altogether in favor of computerized grading machines.4 “Increasingly,” Ollman writes, “university life has been organized on the basis of a complex system of tests, grades, and degrees, so that people know exactly where they fit, what they deserve, what has to be done to rise another notch on the scale, and so on. Discounting—as most educators do—their negative effects on scholarship, critical thinking, and collegiality, these practices have succeeded in instilling a new discipline and respect for hierarchy.”5
To Read the Rest of Excerpts
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Walter Benn Michaels: What Matters
What Matters
Walter Benn Michaels
London Review of Books
...
But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.
An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.
My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.
The recent furore over the arrest for ‘disorderly conduct’ of Henry Louis Gates helps make this clear. Gates, as one of his Harvard colleagues said, is ‘a famous, wealthy and important black man’, a point Gates himself tried to make to the arresting officer – the way he put it was: ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with.’ But, despite the helpful hint, the cop failed to recognise an essential truth about neoliberal America: it’s no longer enough to kowtow to rich white people; now you have to kowtow to rich black people too. The problem, as a sympathetic writer in the Guardian put it, is that ‘Gates’s race snuffed out his class status,’ or as Gates said to the New York Times, ‘I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere.’ In the bad old days this situation almost never came up – cops could confidently treat all black people, indeed, all people of colour, the way they traditionally treated poor white people. But now that we’ve made some real progress towards integrating our elites, you need to step back and take the time to figure out ‘who you’re messing with’. You need to make sure that nobody’s class status is snuffed out by his race.
In the wake of Gates’s arrest, among the hundreds of people protesting the injustice of racial profiling, a white cardiologist married to a black man put the point best when she lamented that even in the ‘diverse area’ where she lives (Hyde Park, Obama’s old neighbourhood) she’ll hear people nervously say, ‘Look at those black guys coming towards us,’ to which she replies: ‘Yes, but they’re wearing lacrosse shorts and Calvin Klein jeans. They’re probably the kids of the professor down the street.’ ‘You have to be able to discern differences between people,’ she went on to say. ‘It’s very frustrating.’ The differences she means, of course, are between rich kids and poor kids, and the frustration she feels is with people who don’t understand that class is supposed to trump race. But while it’s easy to sympathise with that frustration – rich black kids are infinitely less likely to mug you than poor black kids or, for that matter, poor white kids – it’s a lot harder to see it as the expression of a progressive politics.
Nevertheless, that seems to be the way we do see it. The neoliberal ideal is a world where rich people of all races and sexes can happily enjoy their wealth, and where the injustices produced not by discrimination but by exploitation – there are fewer poor people (7 per cent) than black people (9 per cent) at Harvard, and Harvard’s not the worst – are discreetly sent around to the back door. Thus everyone’s outraged that a black professor living on prosperous Ware St (and renting a summer vacation ‘manse’ on Martha’s Vineyard that he ‘jokingly’ calls ‘Tara’) can be treated with disrespect; no one’s all that outraged by the social system that created the gap between Ware St or ‘Tara’ and the places where most Americans live. Everyone’s outraged by the fact that Gates can be treated so badly; nobody by the fact that he and the rest of the top 10 per cent of American wage-earners have been doing so well. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Liberals – especially white liberals – are thrilled by Gates’s success, since it testifies to the legitimacy of their own: racism didn’t make us all this money, we earned it!
To Read the Entire Essay
More:
New Left Review: Walter Benn Michaels - Against Diversity
Walter Benn Michaels
London Review of Books
...
But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.
An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.
My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.
The recent furore over the arrest for ‘disorderly conduct’ of Henry Louis Gates helps make this clear. Gates, as one of his Harvard colleagues said, is ‘a famous, wealthy and important black man’, a point Gates himself tried to make to the arresting officer – the way he put it was: ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with.’ But, despite the helpful hint, the cop failed to recognise an essential truth about neoliberal America: it’s no longer enough to kowtow to rich white people; now you have to kowtow to rich black people too. The problem, as a sympathetic writer in the Guardian put it, is that ‘Gates’s race snuffed out his class status,’ or as Gates said to the New York Times, ‘I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere.’ In the bad old days this situation almost never came up – cops could confidently treat all black people, indeed, all people of colour, the way they traditionally treated poor white people. But now that we’ve made some real progress towards integrating our elites, you need to step back and take the time to figure out ‘who you’re messing with’. You need to make sure that nobody’s class status is snuffed out by his race.
In the wake of Gates’s arrest, among the hundreds of people protesting the injustice of racial profiling, a white cardiologist married to a black man put the point best when she lamented that even in the ‘diverse area’ where she lives (Hyde Park, Obama’s old neighbourhood) she’ll hear people nervously say, ‘Look at those black guys coming towards us,’ to which she replies: ‘Yes, but they’re wearing lacrosse shorts and Calvin Klein jeans. They’re probably the kids of the professor down the street.’ ‘You have to be able to discern differences between people,’ she went on to say. ‘It’s very frustrating.’ The differences she means, of course, are between rich kids and poor kids, and the frustration she feels is with people who don’t understand that class is supposed to trump race. But while it’s easy to sympathise with that frustration – rich black kids are infinitely less likely to mug you than poor black kids or, for that matter, poor white kids – it’s a lot harder to see it as the expression of a progressive politics.
Nevertheless, that seems to be the way we do see it. The neoliberal ideal is a world where rich people of all races and sexes can happily enjoy their wealth, and where the injustices produced not by discrimination but by exploitation – there are fewer poor people (7 per cent) than black people (9 per cent) at Harvard, and Harvard’s not the worst – are discreetly sent around to the back door. Thus everyone’s outraged that a black professor living on prosperous Ware St (and renting a summer vacation ‘manse’ on Martha’s Vineyard that he ‘jokingly’ calls ‘Tara’) can be treated with disrespect; no one’s all that outraged by the social system that created the gap between Ware St or ‘Tara’ and the places where most Americans live. Everyone’s outraged by the fact that Gates can be treated so badly; nobody by the fact that he and the rest of the top 10 per cent of American wage-earners have been doing so well. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Liberals – especially white liberals – are thrilled by Gates’s success, since it testifies to the legitimacy of their own: racism didn’t make us all this money, we earned it!
To Read the Entire Essay
More:
New Left Review: Walter Benn Michaels - Against Diversity
Behind the News with Doug Henwood: Susan Marks, author of Aqua Shock, on the water crises; Walter Benn Michaels, on neoliberalism’s use of “diversity”
Behind the News with Doug Henwood
Susan Marks, author of Aqua Shock, on the water crises
Walter Benn Michaels, on neoliberalism’s use of “diversity”
To Listen to the Episode
Susan Marks, author of Aqua Shock, on the water crises
Walter Benn Michaels, on neoliberalism’s use of “diversity”
To Listen to the Episode
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