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The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

CHAPTER 1

Endgames

Capitalism is a suicide pact.

-Noam Chomsky1

Education and sustainability

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

Traditional Marxist eschatology is thus correct to posit that, driven by its own contradictions, capitalism will finally enter a terminal phase. Yet few have understood until recently just how literally that "terminal" needs to be taken. As the ideological expression of the latest mutation of capitalism - a systemically hybridized monstrosity of state subsidy and oligarchic monopolism - at its deepest structural level neoliberalism amounts to an uncompromising thanatology. It is a death wish that has taken hold of our collective mentality. It will eliminate first the poor and otherwise vulnerable and then it will kill all of us as it destroys the capacity of our planet to sustain human life. I mean this not as hyperbole but as a sober extrapolation from present economic and environmental trends. As John Bellamy Foster and colleagues, in their study of capitalism's effect on the environment, warn: "the stability of the earth system as we know it is being endangered. We are at red alert status."

There are more optimistic scenarios. But at the moment these seem less probable. Unfortunately, sometimes it turns out that the news is bad and it may even lack the silver lining we seem almost hardwired to try to locate. So many of us proceed like we deserve a happy ending, as if by birthright. This sense of cosmic entitlement has a long intellectual history: from the Judaic self-understanding as God's "chosen" people, to the Aristotelian scala naturae where humanity serves as biological telos, to the Calvinist-Puritan-American conviction that God will prosper his elect, to today's suitably banal expectation for technological fixes that "they" will figure out in order to deliver the Hollywood happy ending upon which "we" the audience insist. Human beings may even be hard-wired for a certain degree of psychological ruddiness; speculative evolutionary rationales for the survival positivity of "high hopes" are easy to imagine (though depression may have its own evolutionary rationale as well). But clearly optimism can delude, too. This calls to mind Friedrich Nietzsche's dangerous insight that at times truth can be inimical to life. "Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous?" This attitudinal ambivalence pervades every worthwhile discussion of the realities of the neoliberal predicament in which we now find ourselves.

Take the critical notion of "sustainability" that is often quite reasonably offered in opposition to the present annihilative path. Every reasonable person should be in favor of sustainability. But as a guide for action it can be misleading. Sustainability is largely a strategic notion. It tends to assume as static the desirability of certain outcomes and therefore frequently frames problems as technical malfunctions needing appropriate technical fixes. If I decry our present oil usage as "unsustainable," implicit in that message is an imperative to locate an alternative energy source in order to sustain the same activities fueled by the old energy source. What tends to be assumed is that our general way of doing things, our "lifestyle," needs to be preserved but by alternative means, in this case, say, by developing sources of renewable energy; we are not the problem, it is only our current way of doing things that is to blame. As essayist Paul Kingsnorth pointedly puts it, "It means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world's rich people - us - feel is their right, without destroying the 'natural capital' or the 'resource base' that is needed to do so." Admittedly, this is not what is meant by "sustainability" by our most enlightened activists (one hopes); nonetheless, it is what is heard by an ideologically degraded consumer culture that ultimately sees itself as the universe's center.

In this crucial respect, the rhetoric of sustainability is inadequate for describing the magnitude of what is at stake with neoliberalism and the comprehensive - and compounding damage it currently wreaks. The problem with "sustainability" in the larger context of human survival is that it tends to understate matters. When resource depletion and environmental destruction are factored in, the neoliberal phase of capitalism is more than merely unsustainable. If it is allowed to play out its endgame, it will not just alter our lives and cause us to seek new ways of achieving what we currently desire. It will eliminate us, and when we exit, so will the sustainability question, as the question of what is to be sustained and how to sustain "it" - namely, us - will no longer remain. In this sense, neoliberalism's endgame is not just another problem for clever humanity to figure out and from which to move on. In the parlance of our now endless war against "terror," it represents an existential threat, not a threat against specific practices or even our particular way of life as a whole. It is a threat against life itself: our lives, certainly, and also much other precious nonhuman life as well.

To illustrate the point, I could frame a life-or-death struggle against an assailant as a conflict over the "sustainability" of my life. Once again this would be true but it is misleadingly understated. It would be more accurate to say that I am engaged in a struggle against being eliminated, where I may face the harsh survivalist disjunction of either killing or being killed. The more chronic question of sustainability (and its strategies and solutions) rightfully comes into play only once this more acute life-or-death existential question has been decided. I contend that this is where we are now finding ourselves with capitalism in its neoliberal phase; we have been enduring a chronic condition that has recently turned acute in the life-or-death sense. Consequently, we are subject to that harsh survivalist disjunction: we will have to kill it before it kills us. And soon. For the powerful imperatives for which neoliberal ideology provides cover are actively destroying everything in their path, in a congeries of extractive processes that go well beyond the "creative destruction" ambivalently identified by Marx and celebrated by capitalism's dead enders as an always right and necessary manifestation of market forces. For creative destruction has given way to just plain destruction - alone and for its own sake. Driven by its own kind of internal optimism, Marxist dialectics might see in this rape of nature yet another, though perhaps the final, Hegelian master-slave reversal, where we end up debilitated and conquered by that which we created and over which we thought we had control, like the situation with capital itself writ large. For its part, the Christian tradition might see in all this destructive nihilism the figure of Satan making an audacious apocalyptic move. The scientist simply measures again and sees more and more clearly a planet in peril, one already ominously exceeding life's limits across what leading environmental scientists have identified as nine key "planetary boundaries".

This book focuses on the one area that, broadly construed, almost all oppositional forces agree is the sine qua non for any possible salvific response: education. Education comprises a highly ambivalent set of practices in this connection: everything from servicing capital accumulation as additive "human capital" to providing a potential seedbed for real resistance against the same. Temporally, it is both a lagging and leading indicator, by its very nature showing us both past and future. Much that it accomplishes merely reproduces the existing social order while at the same time it also provides sites for the development of the inevitably altered rising generations. Further, it functions at both the smallest scale of personal experience - from gestalt "aha!" moments to (reported) individual spiritual awakenings - while it also scales up as a sociologically larger phenomenon having to do with mass government schooling, public awareness campaigns, policies having to do with the societal flow of information, and the like. Education exists both formally in schools, workplaces and other institutions yet also informally in group and intimate settings and in an almost infinite variety of popular media - all of the above instantiating education in its widest anthropological sense as the transmission of culture. Of course it also goes beyond transmission in a static sense as well. The very act of transmission often generates novelty, as what is learned has its own appropriative autonomy. And education is also almost always perhaps merely always - what sets the scene for innovation and discovery. It is among the largest and most varied human phenomena and the approaches to it are infinitely varied. There are "educational" aspects to everything. So some specificity is required in order to make meaningful claims.

Accordingly, a specific focus will be on education in one of its most formal and largest-scale aspects, namely, the enterprise of universal public education that has become a definitive component of the world's most developed economies. The qualifiers "universal" and "public" are of course perpetually contested and have both meant different things in different eras and different things to different parties in the same era. For example, there are always to be found unresolved but basic distributive questions about who exactly gets this education and similarly unresolved substantive questions concerning what precisely it is that "they" are to get. Be all that as it may, the shorthand term for this unwieldy grab bag of phenomena may be reduced accurately enough to "schooling": a selective formalization of ongoing educational practices. Schooling itself has been around a long, long time, perhaps in some form since the advent of the settled communities made possible by agriculture some 10,000 years ago. It obviously far predates capitalism. Its modern institutionalized form, however, arose along with the labor needs of nascent industrial capitalism, in the US things really took off with the rise of factory production in the nineteenth century. Though not alone, capitalists quite clearly and deliberately built the institution of schooling as we now know it - along with the ancillary legal framework of compulsory education that supports it. Although it contains plenty of its own internal peculiarities, schooling's structural core has always consisted of its economic functionality, including its service to the economic and political elites who typically coordinate that functionality. So nobody should become doe-eyed about any alleged golden era where schools were bastions of authentic learning and civic ideals. They have always been sites of both domination and, to at least some extent, resistance - now no less than in earlier times. Schools therefore provide an interesting and ultimately telling vantage point from which to observe the depredations of neoliberalism, as they function both as symptoms of those depredations yet also as staging areas from which resistances constantly arise, just as in the realm of production itself. It is in the nature of the thing to be both symptom and cause.

This traditionally dual aspect of schooling is also reflected in the more personal experiences of education that are possible. As the practices of teaching and learning, it reflects the range of human beings' moral capabilities and ambivalences. On the one hand we are causally determined playthings of larger forces who can do no other than as we do. But on the other hand, from within our own experience we ourselves undergo our lives as if we possess the personal capability to exercise our will. Spinoza says that free will is merely an illusion caused by ignorance of the causes of our actions. That may be true. But still, it is also true that we nonetheless feel that we can act and probably are not capable of ridding ourselves of that experience, however finally illusory it may be, save perhaps in the extraordinary and fleeting epiphanies said to be achieved by the world's aesthetic and spiritual masters. As our illusions may surely damn us, it may well prove that suitably transformed they may save us too. This contradictory pedagogical "workshop where ideals are manufactured," to use Nietzsche's phrase, are thus an appropriate primary focus. It matters how we see ourselves.

I offer little uplift, though, and certainly no Boy Scout techniques for sustaining our current activities. As a philosopher I am committed to the deepest intellectual pessimism, in Hegel's sense that if it flies at all, the Owl of Minerva alights only at dusk. And after dusk is darkness.

Falling rates, instability, extraction

Neoliberalism deals eliminationist death in two interrelated modes:

1 as a function of internal economic contradictions rooted in capitalist production

2 as a function of external environmental contradictions occasioned by capitalist production

Current and future prospects for education must be understood as profoundly shaped by both of these phenomena. Educational The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame practices and institutions have some ideological autonomy. But education at all levels currently labors under mercilessly severe constraints supplied by neoliberalism along these two axes that have become definitive of capitalism's current and so far most desperate phase.

First the internal economic contradictions. I will address two interrelated themes that are, I believe, driving contemporary events, including the recent economic crisis:

The first of these is identified by Karl Marx as the counterintuitive TRPF. Though typically hidden by an array of counter forces, the TRPF is the first of three root causes that I will discuss that all but guarantee late capitalism can only lurch from one crisis to the next, to such an extent that it should be understood that crisis is actually a "normal" part of today's capitalist system. There is no easy fix for the TRPF for, as I explain below, it is arises from within the very internal dynamics of capitalist production, namely the interplay of technology and labor in the form of productivity and in the long-term ability of rising productivity to generate the profits that fuel the entire system.

The TRPF had experienced its own falling rate of popularity, even among otherwise sympathetic thinkers such as David Harvey, until its recent resuscitation by prominent Marxist theorists such as the late Chris Harman, Guglielmo Carchedi, Alex Callinicos and Andrew Kliman. Unusual for high Marxist theory, the TRPF and associated ideas also enjoy an able popularization in the compelling educational videos created by YouTube sensation Brendan Cooney as part of his Kapitalism 101 project. Through careful analysis of the relevant texts, especially the later volumes of Capital, as well as supplementary empirical work on the best available recent economic data in this very difficult area (see especially Kliman's analysis of relevant data on profitability), these theorists in the ensemble make a convincing case that since the 1970s, world capitalism has experienced an epochal change due largely to technological change and its effects upon productivity. As shall be explained below, via the TRPF, these productivity increases have generated a crisis of profitability first in manufacturing and later in other sectors. To be sure, as Marx himself immediately pointed out, there are many counter forces, to the extent that the counter forces become in some sense a larger story - neoliberalism itself being one such. And it is, in my view, undecidable as to the precise extent the TRPF drives events. Economics simply isn't that "hard" a science as it claims to be - let alone predictive - beyond a certain level of confidence. Some Marxist proponents of the TRPF err in fact in this scientistic direction. I have no stake in the "intestine wars" of Marxist economics and there is good reason to be as wary of Marxist sectarians as one should be of all sectarians because, by definition, they tend to end up valuing doctrinal purity over truth. As a cautious philosophical outsider, then, I will content myself with a weaker and more defensible claim than is advanced by some of the theory's proponents: the TRPF matters, and if it is not the reason capitalism is morphing into its death spiral neoliberal phase, it is surely a reason.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame by David J. Blacker. Copyright © 2013 David J. Blacker. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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