After the Future

Why the Coming Common Core State Standards Are a Technocratic Disaster in the Making

Anthony Cody sums it up pretty well. The column is really about how the national teachers' unions, as usual,  are on the wrong side of this:

The Obama administration's education policies have been, by and large, a disaster. And Republicans are poised to rev up their attack machine on these grounds and teacher unions will be smeared right along with the administration so long as they are on board.

The problem is many of us AGREE WITH conservatives on much of their critique. Or we ought to. We are not opposed to loose curricular guidelines, but we should NOT be in favor of the sort of highly prescriptive standards and high stakes assessments that are coming with Common Core. And we also need to be concerned about the shift of resources away from classroom professionals and into technology, and the huge expansion of data systems, both of which are part and parcel of the Common Core project. And they are also correct about the undemocratic process that has been pursued to develop the Common Core, and the way the Department of Education has used Race to the Top bribes and NCLB waivers to coerce states into adopting the Core. We also disagree with some of their critique. But we cannot put forward a clear, compelling vision so long as we [teachers] are on the sidelines in this debate - much less if we are on the wrong side altogether.

The NEA and AFT have positioned themselves as the "expert implementers" of the Common Core. That essentially means the unions are standing by Duncan's side and saying "we are the professionals. You just tell us what to do, and we can do it better than anyone." That renders us politically powerless. We have given up our opportunity to advance an independent vision for accountability and school reform.

Some have suggested that the standards are not the problem. We can work on implementing the standards, but focus our objections on the high stakes tests that may come later. There are a couple of problems with this. First of all, politically, the battle over the Common Core is happening now, and it is being defined primarily by people like Glenn Beck. The unions are being defined as allies, aiders and abettors of the Common Core, and unless union leaders and members speak out about our concerns, that will be accurate.

Secondly, the tests are already arriving, as we have seen in New York. And they are terrible. We were promised a "next generation" of assessments that would be so much smarter. Tests that adjust their difficulty as students respond. These are the very sorts of tests that the teachers and students in Seattle are boycotting. The hours spent on testing is doubling, tripling. We are testing third graders on computers. I spoke with kindergarten teachers last week in California who must spend an hour and a half testing each child in their class three times a year. That turns into three weeks of testing, repeated fall, winter and spring. Nine weeks of teaching lost! As parents become aware of these tests they are up in arms. The opt-out movement is gaining strength rapidly in New York, as the new tests arrive.

We also need to be very concerned about the expansion of data systems containing vast amounts of information about students AND teachers. This will be used not only to closely monitor students, but also to track teacher "effectiveness," for all sorts of high stakes decisions, including teacher evaluation and pay. There is a growing backlash as this sort of project is uncovered, as seen last week in Louisiana.

I have written before about how I see a battle being fought now for the soul of American public education. On one side are humanists, and on the other technocrats. I think there are some humanists who sincerely support the common core as an ideal, and I can understand their thinking, but it is naive support. The common core is a creature of the neoliberal technocratic mindset, and it will be used as one tool among many now being deployed to further dehumanize the education provided in our public schools, whatever propaganda is spewn to deny such an intent.

Cultural Hegemony

There was a time way back when--in the seventies--when I made an attempt to grapple with the kind of neo-Marxist thought for which the Frankfurt School was typical. I didn't get far, because while parts of it interested me, particularly its critique, it didn't deliver enough value for me to justify the time and effort to hack through it. During that time I must have come across Antonio Gramsci, but I don't remember anything about him. My recent reading of David Harvey has piqued my interest. I will get around to reading Gramsci at some point, but meanwhile, here's what the Wikipedia article says about his idea of "cultural hegemony":

Orthodox Marxism had predicted that socialist revolution was inevitable in capitalist societies. By the early 20th century, no such revolution had occurred in the most advanced nations. Capitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through ideology. The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which propagated its own values and norms so that they became the 'common sense' values of all. People in the working-class (and other classes) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.

To counter the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, the working class needed to develop a culture of its own. Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci's view, a class cannot dominate in modern conditions by merely advancing its own narrow economic interests. Neither can it dominate purely through force and coercion. Rather, it must exert intellectual and moral leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a ‘historic bloc’, taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations and ideas. In this manner, Gramsci developed a theory that emphasized the importance of the political and ideological superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the economic base.

Gramsci stated that bourgeois cultural values were tied to folklore, popular culture and religion, and therefore much of his analysis of hegemonic culture is aimed at these. He was also impressed by the influence Roman Catholicism had and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci saw Marxism as a marriage of the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism and the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to think of it as an expression of their own experience.

For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on a "consented" coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force.

Gramsci and I probably differ regarding what this alternative culture ought to look like, but maybe not. We would probably both agree that the social movements associated with Liberation Theology in Latin America in the seventies and eighties were an attempt to create precisely this alternative worker culture that met both the spiritual and social/economic needs of the immiserated. People like Joseph Ratzinger, who did everything he could to quash it, feared that the movement was driven by cynical communist agitators rather than by the Holy Spirit. Nothing is pure; I'm sure there were some who used Liberation Theology as a demagogic tool for their own political ends, but there were also plenty of people who didn't. It's too bad Ratzinger felt himself incapable of trusting that perhaps the latter was really in control and would win out in the end. 

I'm spending so much time recently on trying to understand what Neoliberalism is because it's the best name we can give to the ideology of our current cultural hegemons. It's important to understand it and how it works. But it's one thing to have a critique; it's one thing to know that almost everything you hear in the media is b.s. because it is subordinated to self-justifying Neoliberal narrative. It's another to provide a robust alternative that works because it's saturated with truth--in the satyagraha sense. Such a social-cultural movement would be irresistible if it came into being, and I believe sooner or later it will. Nothing short of it will work. Nothing short of that will have the unifying cultural legtimacy to provide the countervailing force that can take on the reigning cultural hegemenony that is saturated with bullshit and the soul-crushing alienation that comes with it. 

P.S. I've been watching House of Cards over the last week, and it's great study in legitmation and delegitimation within the very narrow limits of the cultural hegemony that dominates within the Beltway. Ideology is a means to an end, the end being power acquisition. There are sincere ideologues, in the sense that they believe their own b.s., but in that world sincerity is a weakness that makes them useful fools, putty in the hands of the people who understand how power works and could care less about anything else. 

Quote of the Day: David Harvey

But one persistent fact within this complex history of uneven neoliberalization has been the universal tendency to increase social inequality and to expose the least fortunate elements in any society--be it in Indonesia, Mexico, or Britain--to the chill winds of austerity and the dull fate of increasing marginalization . . . . The incredible concentrations of wealth and power that now exist in the upper echelons of capitalism have not been seen since the 1920s. The flows of tribute into the world's major financial centres have been astonishing. What, however is even more astonishing is the habit of treating all of this as a mere and in some instances even unfortunate byproduct of neoliberalization. The very idea that this might be--just might be--the fundamental core of what neoliberalization has been about all along appears unthinkable. It has been apart of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full 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 most particularly in the main financial centres of global capitalism. (BHoN, pp. 118-89)

Neoliberalism is a political choice. It's being made for us, not by us, but it has enormous power because ithas an air of inevitability about it. Margaret Thatcher often used to say as she snapped her neoliberal whip in the 1980s, "There is no alternative."  Well, there is actually. But it's something that I fear we will find our way to only after a few more asset bubbles burst.

Global neoliberalism is fundamentally destabilizing--certainly in its economic volatility, but also for the way it destabilizes governments, cultural life, the way it undermines national sovreignty and erodes traditional ways of life. It is creating an immiserated, deracinated global mob, and its desperation will not be mitigated by market mechanisms.  Let us hope that most countries will find a way to adjust as the US did in the 1930s, and not as the Germansdid. As Harvey points out elsewhere, there is nothing inherently democracy loving about neoliberalism; it only cares about is the kind of stability that makes business possible--better Pinochet than Allende. Democracy is tolerated so long as it stays out of the way. But authoritarian repression is shortlived because it is in its own way an intensifier of destabilization. 

Commonplace Freedoms

What Gramsci calls 'common sense' . . . typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of long-standing practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as 'good sense' that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can, therefore, be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices. Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers, or 'others') can be mobilized to mask other realities. Political slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. The word 'freedom' resonates so widely with the common-sense understanding of Americans that it becomes 'a button that elites can press to open the door in the masses' to justify almost anything. Thus could Bush retrospectively justify the Iraq war. Gramsci therefore concluded that political questions become 'insoluble' when 'disguised as cultural ones'. (David Harvey, BHoN, p. 39)

I've never read Gramsci, but I've been saying here for years that we need to separate out political issues from cultural issues. People who belong to different tribes frequently have a common enemy, and they figure out how to make alliances when facing a common threat. But that would require a level of 'good sense' that neither traditionalist nor cosmopolitan tribalists in American society seem capable of mustering. 

In the rhetorical tradition, the verbal tool used to evoke common sense is the commonplace. A common place is an idea or a value that one absorbs with one's mother's milk. It's assumed to be true the way we all assume that the truth in an adage like the "early bird gets the worm." Politics runs on commonplaces, and the rhetorical challenge is to develop narratives that resonate with American commonplaces.

In the post I put up the other day, I talk about how Neoliberalism's appeal lies in its use of commonplaces. I quote Harvey who says "The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental, as a  'central values of civilization'." These are the core values of the liberal tradition tracing back to the 1600s. But the real question is whose freedom, whose dignity? Harvey concludes his first chapter with this passage:

Thirty years of neoliberal freedoms have, after all, not only restored power to a narrowly defined capitalist class. They have also produced immense concentrations of corporate power in energy, the media, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and even retailing (for example Wal-Mart). The freedom of the market that Bush proclaims as the high point of human aspiration turns out to be nothing more than the convenient means to spread corporate monopoly power and Coca Cola everywhere without constraint. With disproportionate influence over the media and the political process this class (with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News in the lead) has both the incentive and the power to persuade us that we are all better off under a neoliberal regime of freedoms. For the elite, living comfortably in their gilded ghettos, the world must indeed seem a better place. As Polanyi might have put it, neoliberalism confers rights and freedoms on those 'whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing', leaving a pittance for the rest of us. How is it, then, that 'the rest of us' have so easily acquiesced in this state of affairs? (David Harvey, BHoN, p. 38)

How is it indeed? Well, part of the answer is that we have been skillfully manipulated by powerful factions who know their way around a commonplace. The appeal to American values that made sense in a country of 5 million people before the industrial revolution is being very effectively deployed to reinforce political and economic arrangements that favor these elites. And the opposition to these ideas has been very successfully framed as 'socialism', which is anathema to these ideals. The result is 

Commodifying the Un-commodifiable

From Michael Sandel's "What Isn't for Sale" in the April Atlantic:

This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it—without ever deciding to do so—we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.

The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?

As Sandel points out elsewhere in the article, one of the consequences of living in a market society is that there is a bias toward commodifying everything because we don't want to make judgments or develop a consensus about what is better and worse. 

In its own way, market reasoning also empties public life of moral argument. Part of the appeal of markets is that they don’t pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy. They don’t ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex, or a kidney, and a consenting adult is willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is “How much?” Markets don’t wag fingers. They don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and unworthy ones. Each party to a deal decides for him- or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged.

This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics afflicting many societies today.

I hate diffident non-judgmentalism. Tolerance, ok. We don't hate those with whom we disagree, but let's argue about what we believe and why. Let's stop being so wishy washy. Believe me the privatizers are clear about what they want, and they love it when the best of us lack all conviction.

P.S. This is the basic argument of David Graeber's book Debt that I've been excerpting quotes from in the last couple of weeks. I hope to have a post some time that goes into the book's argument. He has a new book out, a part of which was excerpted the other day in Salon. It's entitled The Democracy Project. 

Seductive Neoliberalism

For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted  and not open to question. The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental, as a  "central values of civilization''. In so doing they chose wisely, for these are indeed compelling and seductive ideals. These values, they held, were threatened not only by fascism, dictatorships, and communism, but  by all forms of state intervention that substituted collective judgments for those of individuals to choose. David Harvey--A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 5

The United States from its origins is a liberal society. A liberal society is one characterized by free markets with minimal state interference, a celebration of individual freedom and private property rights, and a democratically legitimated government that protects basic rights like freedom of speech and religion. In the Anglo-American world classic dominant political economic paradigm, but from it developed in the U.S. what might be called reform liberalism or progressive liberalism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Progressive liberalism, while embracing the basic values framework of classic liberalism, emerged as it became clear that classic liberalism led to the immiseration of the workers who labored within the large new industrial complexes that developed after the Civil War in the U.S. Classic liberalism created wealth, but it didn't distribute it well or fairly. 

Progressive liberalism sought to use the power of governments to restrain the more predatory practices of emerging large corporations and to mitigate the disruptive social and economic effects caused by a rapidly developing and innovative capitalist market economy. Progressive liberalism in the U.S. is similar in many respects to social emocracy in Europe in that both seek an economic middle road between markets and government controls, but both derive from different post-Enlightenment intellectual traditions. Progressive liberalism is an attempt to moderate the extremes of bare-knuckled laissez-faire capitalism; European social democracy comes out of the other branch of Enlightenment political economic thinking--revolutionary socialism, and sought to mitigate its violently disruptive agenda of bare-knuckled revolutionary socialism.

I think American progressive liberalism's roots in the classic liberal tradition make it peculiarly allergic to the more dirigiste forms of European social democracy. Calling Obama, or anybody with any influence on the American national scene who doesn't come from Vermont, a socialist is facetious. Socialism has never had much broad seductive power in the U.S. Progressive liberalism is more experimental and adaptive, rather than ideologically driven. Keynes gave it a theoretical framework, but FDR came before Keynes. 

In the US, laissez-faire liberalism dominated from the 1865 to 1932, and progressive liberalism dominated from 1933 to 1975. Laissez-faire Liberalism re-emerged during the shock decade of the 1970s during the Carter administration, was aggressively implemented during the Reagan administration, settled in during the Clinton administration, and It should have self-destructed during the Bush administration, but it didn't. Many people, me included, thought that the shock of the aughts--the U.S. government's reckless war-making and fiscal policies coupled with the financial markets disaster of 2008 would have forced adjustments in the direction of progressive liberalism, but the Obama administration has largely embraced neoliberalism as its basic policy framework.

Our politics in the US might be described now as mainly a factional dispute between right and left neoliberals. Neoliberalism is classic liberalism in a postindustrial key. It's an open question now whether the dominance of progressive liberalism from the thirties through the seventies was aberrational, and we've now returned to the historical norm. From where we stand now, it would appear so. But the ascendancy of neoliberalism doesn't explain what's going on in Washington now, and why the government is paralyzed and it's impossible to even get sensible gun control legislation enacted that 90% of the American population supports. Why isn't there more consensus in both parties if both are more or less agreed about neoliberal objectives?

I'd argue that the Democrats are, relatively speaking, serious neoliberals, while the Republicans are not. Democrats are serious about governing in accordance with Neoliberal principles.That means they embrace liberal social values while also embracing fiscally conservative agenda that seeks free trade, lower taxes and privatization of public institutions, cuts to entitlements, deregulation, weakening of collective bargaining rights, and a fetish regarding balanced budgets and reducing deficits. 

The Republicans, on the other hand, are not serious at all about governance; they seek to use government power as a crony system primarily to protect and promote the interests of the very wealthy. Both parties are cronyist, but it's far more extreme and blatant in the Republican party. The Republican agenda overlaps with the Neoliberal agenda, but it departs from it when it conflicts with its strategies to maintain its political power or to wrest it from the Democrats who, though neoliberal in its essence still have to deal with progressive liberals in its caucus.The acquisition and exercise of political power is the most important objective for Republicans. It's a game many of them are playing as an end in itself without regard for what's good for the country as a whole. Governance is not something they care about, believe in, or do very effectively. Rather than shaming the GOP for their governance failures, the media accept it as evidence for the Republican contention that Government cannot govern effectively. 

Both parties have bases, which party elites in each have to manage and appease from time to time, but neither base poses serious threats to elites in either party. Elites within the GOP have to deal with the cultural conservatives and religious right that compose their base, and elites within the Democratic party have to deal with a loose confederation of groups that are a mix of Progressive liberals on economic issues and cultural liberals who care more about identity politics than economic issues, and have little understanding of or care about the Neoliberal agenda.

This separation on cultural issues is exploited by economic elites to keep workers and the middle class divided in their separate cultural silos so they won't unite around economic issues. As a result, the cultural conservatives within the Republican Party are almost as powerless as the Progressive liberals are within the Democratic Party. Both factions get tossed crumbs, but neither is able to get its agenda taken seriously, except insofar as aspects of it overlap with the Neoliberal agenda. The culturally conservative GOP base gets opposition to sensible gun control as its crumb du jour; the progressive base gets support for abortion, gay marriage, as its crumbs du jour. I'm not saying some elites are insincere in their support or opposition to these cultural issues. I am saying that our preoccupation with them distracts us from dealing with deeper structural developments that have led to the emasculation of the progressive liberal economic agenda.

So while the Democratic Party power structure is dominated by neoliberals, it must embraces progressive liberals as part of its coalition as the GOP must embrace cultural conservatives. There are many neoliberals--Tom Friedman comes to mind--who are earnest utopians in their embrace of neoliberalism. And so an important place where  earnest neoliberals true believers  and their earnest counterparts in the Progressive faction differ is in a basic philosophical difference regarding globalization.

Neoliberals see it as something that lies outside of the power of national governments to control and so see the more realistic course as rolling with it rather than fighting it. They accept free market capitalism as on the whole a dynamic, if somewhat disruptive, positive force, and seek to mitigate its more disruptive effects by promoting improved education to prepare future workers for a dynamically changing work place and retraining programs  for adults to mitigate the effects of structural, chronic worker displacement. The fundamental presuppositions of neoliberalism are social darwinist: adapt or die. 

Progressive liberals accept that we are living in a rapidly integrating world system, but think that national governments can play a more proactive role in shaping national policy to benefit the interests of the broad public. This was essential goal of the Breton-Woods system==to find a Keynesian balance between desirable economic global integration and national sovereignty. Neoliberalism cares about the first but says there's little that can be done or should be done regarding the second. The neoliberals used the shocks of the seventies to discredit the Keynesian compromise, and have reverted us to the world system that existed before WWI. We're back in a kind of global economic wild west dominated by transnational economic warlords.

So we've seen this movie before. Yes, things are different now, but progressive liberals complain that neoliberal policies derive from political choices that benefit elite interests, and are not simply a necessary adjustment to the inevitable forces of globalization. But their critique has been unable to get any traction in the national corridors of power because while progressive liberal policy ideas resonate with a majority of Americans, they don't with elites in either party, and because wealthy elites are running things, nothing changes until that changes.  And that's not going to change until progressive liberals come up with a counter narrative that is more broadly seductive than the neoliberal one. It must provide "a conceptual apparatus . . . that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit." And organizes a people's movement around it. 

 

Don't Blame the Schools

From Salon this morning:

The United States ranked in the bottom four of a United Nations report on child well-being. Among 29 countries, America landed second from the bottom in child poverty and held a similarly dismal position when it came to “child life satisfaction.”

Keeping the U.S. company at the bottom of the report, which gauged material well-being, overall health, access to housing and education, were Lithuania, Latvia and Romania, three of the poorest countries in the survey.

UNICEF said in a statement on the survey that child poverty in countries like the U.S. “is not inevitable but is policy-susceptible” and that there isn’t necessarily a strong relationship between per capita GDP and overall child well-being, explaining: “The Czech Republic is ranked higher than Austria, Slovenia higher than Canada, and Portugal higher than the United States.”

The Netherlands ranked number one on the list, with Norway, Iceland, Finland and Sweden filling out the top five.

Whenever you hear somebody decrying the "achievement gap", and how America's schools are failing, send them the link to this article. The U.S. is near the top when it comes to per capita GDP, but the more important issue is how the wealth produced by GDP is distributed. There is something terribly wrong with us, and we are incapable of doing anything about it.  We have the wealth; we don't have the imagination or the will to distribute it fairly:

The Neoliberal World System

When the Keynesian settlement was finally put into effect, after World War II, it was offered only to a relatively small slice of the world's population. As time when on, more and more people wanted in on the deal. Almost all of the popular movements of the period from 1945 to 1975, even perhaps revolutionary movements, could be seen as demands for inclusion: demands for political equality that assumed equality was meaningless without some level of economic security. . . . At some point in the '70s, things reached a breaking point. It would appear that capitalism, as a system, simply cannot extend such a deal to everyone. Quite possibly it wouldn't even remain viable if all its workers were free wage laborers; certainly it will never be able to provide everyone in the world the sort of life lived by, say, a 1960s auto worker in Michigan or Turin. . . . The result might be termed a crisis of inclusion. By the late 1970s the existing order was clearly in a state of collapse, plagued simultaneously by financial chaos, food riots, oil shock, widespread doomsday prophecies of the end of growth and ecological crisis--al of which, it turned out, proved to be ways of putting the populace on notice that all deals were off.

The moment that we start framing the story this way, it's easy to see that the next thirty years, the period from roughly 1978 to 2009, follows nearly the same pattern. Except that the deal, the settlement, had changed. Certainly, when both Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the UK launched a systematic attack on the power of labor unions, as well as on the legacy of Keynes, it was a way of explicitly declaring that all previous deals were off. Everyone could now have political rights . . . but political rights were to become economically meaningless. (David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, p. 374-75)

Before 2003 when I first started writing this blog, religious and philosophical issues were the primary focus of my reading and thinking. I honestly didn't care that much about what was happening in the political and economic spheres. I saw any hope then for  real change as developing out of the cultural sphere, with the political and economic spheres reacting to it. I still believe that, but I have come to believe that the encroachment of the political and economic spheres in the cultural sphere is crowding out what I think of as spiritual possibility. The conditions for the possibility of spiritual initiatives are becoming increasingly sterile. Neoliberalism is the name for the toxic reigning world view in the political and economic spheres that is sterilizing spiritual possibility in this way.

Before 2003, I'd have described myself as a generic social democrat. I voted for Clinton in '92, but for Nader in '96 and 2000. It was then that I was beginning to wake up to this Neoliberal thing. But my assumption during the '80s and '90s was that the world created by Thatcher and Reagan was aberrational, that the pendulum would eventually swing back to some sensible approximation of the New Deal compromise between markets and governments. I no longer believe that. I don't think there's going to be a pendulum swing. I believe now things are fundamentally different. I think we're locked in. 

We're locked in because since the fall of the Soviet Union, Neoliberalism has become the dominant narrative around which this globalization is organized in the political and economic spheres, and there is no alternative political economic world view with a constituency powerful enough to push back against it. Some promising things have emerged in Latin America while the US has been preoccupied with its imperial follies in the Middle East, but will they be able to survive if and when the people who run things start paying more attention?

A lot of us, even if we accept that the trente glorieuses  were then and this is now, still think that a new deal has to be negotiated, we want negotiate that deal from a position where we have some leverage. But Neoliberalism isn't interested in negotiating, and its principals have worked hard and are still working to make it as difficult as possible for ordinary people to have any power or leverage in the negotiations. The unions have been eviscerated. We certainly no longer have any power in the political process because the Neoliberal world view is embraced with minor variations by political elites in both parties in the U.S., and it's the narrative that has become accepted without question by the people around the world who are running things. And it will continue to dominate elite thinking until a plausible alternative emerges.

But I fear that it will only emerge out of the rubble of Neoliberalism's self-destruction--a collapse that will not be easy or painless for any of us. The crisis of 2008 was a warning, but not one that the people running the world seem to have heeded. Why have they not heeded it?  Because Neoliberalism is a fundamentally myopic world view that justifies the status quo for those who are currently running things. And the people running things, like the Roman Senatorial class of old, are incapable of thinking long term or seeing the big picture. They are concerned only about themselves, and from where they stand, things look pretty good. And who is proposing a plausible alternative--if by 'plausible' one means 'continuing to benefit those who are running things'? 

More on all this theme as we move forward.

 

 

Quote of the Day: David Graeber

What the 1% are is, effectively, a ruling class, they represent the point where concentrated wealth can be turned into political power. National politics in the US has been reduced to battles between different factions of that 1%. This is not just a traditional Marxist bourgeoisie though—and this is where I think it dovetails with the argument in debt—it represents the effects of financialization whereby more and more, economic value is not extracted indirectly, through the wage, but directly, through rents and more generally by what they used to call “political-jural extraction,” which I think was Perry Anderson’s term for feudalism. I’m not saying we’re reverting to feudalism quite, but something else in some ways analogous.

Whenever a surplus is extracted directly rather than indirectly, ideology also changes, since it’s much harder to disguise what’s really going on. Hence the neoliberal obsession, noted in the book, in preemptive attacks on anything that even looks like it’s an alternative. They’re barely even trying to convince anyone capitalism is a good system any more; just arguing that no other system is conceivable. (Source)

I am preparing a post, or perhaps a series of posts, on Neoliberalism, and I will lean heavily on David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5000 Years and David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism. The goal is to understand how we let Neoliberalism and its financialization of reality become "normal". How we have come to accept market mechanisms in the economic sphere as normative, but have come more and more to accept that we live in a market society, as well, in which so many social, non-familial transactions are about interest rather than about mutual aid and support of one another's flourishing.

I have spent a lot of time talking here about the ongoing destructive effect of Neoliberal ideas in public education, but while acute there, the negative effects are more pervasive and broadly dehumanizing.  Of course, lots of people resist the Neoliberal world view and find it repugnant, but they're not the people running things. And the ambitious do not rise in this political economy unless they embrace it as normative.

Neoliberals and those who accept the Neoliberal order tend to think of what has happened to the political economy, especially in the last thirty years since the toppling of Keynes, as a reversion to the natural order, or that it's the inevitable consequence of globalization, that we must let 'nature' take its course, that there's no fighting it, and that all other alternatives are either naive or harmful. 

Then, if I have the time and energy, I want to spend some time reflecting on the Hayek/Polanyi polarity. The goal is not to polemicize but to understand the underlying assumptions, the metaphysics, so to say, of each thinker's world view. And also to bring into the discussion other thinkers who explore either side of this polarity. 

Quote of the Day: William James

“I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of mans pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top. You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself.”

William James, letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman, June 7, 1899. The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, vol. 2, p. 90.

Erase to the Top

Here are some posts I put up when this cheating scandal in Atlanta first broke in 2011. See here, here and here. 

The emphasis on test scores is all about the technocratic compulsion to measure one kid againsst another, one teacher against another, one school against another--to what end? Does anyone with good sense think that this demand that everhyone measure up to some bureuacrats's standard is somehow going to significantly improve learning? 

Assessments are part of learning. No one is questioning that. But anybody who knows anything about how learning happens understands that bubble tests give the most superficial kind of assessment. They have some superficial value, but they don't tell you the important things that other assessments and a teacher's just knowing his or her kids can tell you. 

This compulsion toward standardized testing is complex, but it abets the idea that most teachers are incomptent, and that we need some objective standard to assess teachers and to hold them accountable. But as I've argued before, if you want to improve educational outcomes, train teachers well, pay them a decent wage, and trust them to do their jobs. Everything follows from that.