Capitalism K
Notes
Top
Email for questions about the file
History of the capitalist critique of education
Henry J. Perkinson, in The Imperfect Panacea, American Faith in Education(1865–1965), traces the centrist’s promise of education from Horace Mann to John Dewey to Lyndon B. Johnson. Summarizing this history, economists Herbert Bowles and Samuel Gintis set out two versions of the promise: democracy and technocratic meritocracy. They were the first ones the critique the intersection of capitalism and education and how there was material exploitation in schools through the creation of neoliberal subjectivity.
Framework Tricks
This topic is education- use that to your advantage on the framework debate and the alt debate by indicting their education to be capitalist, and how the education you elucidate through historical analysis is better because it raises class- consciousness.
Phrases
“It’s like saying if we teach people how to play musical chairs well enough, everyone will get a seat.”
“Schools don’t necessarily make a better society; they simply get people ready for the society that exists.”
Blühdorn Explanation
There are some Blühdorn cards that have some strategic edge to them. They should be read against identity affirmatives.
The key distinction—capitalism is not just an exchange of capital, but it is exchange of ideas and protests. Protests, or trying to create a revolution centered around identity is in bad faith, because capitalism commodifies those movements, like corporations making t- shirts that become the face of those movements. That splits coalitions and creates competition between protests. The idea of celebrating difference is complicit in neoliberalism, and thus contained. Individuals always try to retain their difference through self- expression, which is bad. We don’t work through time of liberal democracy; peoples concerns are re- absorbed in the capitalist market.
Protests should not be understood the challenging the status quo, but an integral part of society. We need an analysis of the structure of society before the social movement because it is too individual. Capitalism makes it so that people aren’t seen as autonomous individuals, but they are their consumer profile.
The alternative is to de- nucleate society. This means that there is no center of power. The center of power operates through logic of the market, but not as a centralized entity.
1NC
Generic Shell
The affirmative’s reform to education is part and parcel of the capitalization of education— public schooling has been redefined to meet the standards for global economic competition. Only a class- based approach can solve.
Au & Ferrare ‘15-- (Wayne Au, is an Assistant Professor in the Education Program at the University of Washington; Joseph J. Ferrare, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies & Evaluation and Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky. My research interests cut across the fields of sociology and public policy, “Mapping Corporate Education Reform- Power and Policy Networks in the Neoliberal State”, 2015, pg. 4-7) kb
Critical to any discussion of neoliberalism generally, but particularly neoliberalism in education, is the role of the state within the neoliberal framework. Because state regulation and state intervention are seen as obstacles to free market competition, neoliberalism advocates for the existence of a very small state government with limited function. The neoliberal state needs to help maintain the integrity of currency, maintain defense and police forces, and keep some semblance of a judiciary system, all in support of maintaining rights to private property and keeping the markets free and open. Further, the neoliberal state must support the creation of markets free and open. Further, the neoliberal state must support the creation of markets in all areas in which they do not yet exist (e.g., education or health care), but once those markets are established, the state must keep its interventions to the bare minimum. The neoliberal state also takes on other functions, such as redistributing wealth upwards to elite classes through change to tax codes to benefit corporations and the wealthy, and by shrinking government spending on programs aimed at social support (Harvey, 2007). As the neoliberal state shrinks (itself the result of the neoliberal commitment to deregulation and market forces), responsibilities for governing are increasingly shifted from democratically elected state governments towards private bodies that are unelected and unaccountable to the voting public. As Lipman (2011) notes, this is a radical shift from government to governance: The “triumph of market ideology” is coupled with an erosion of the idea that informed citizens should make decisions based on the general welfare. The shift from governance by experts and managers and decision making by judicial authority and executive order is central to neoliberal policy making… Public- private partnerships, appointed managers, and publicly unaccountable bodies comprised of appointed state and corporate leaders make decisions abouturban development, transportation,schools, and other public infrastructure using business rationales. In these arrangements, the state acts as an agent of capital. Indeed, this shift from government to governance in the neoliberal state is a critical aspect of Mapping Corporate Education Reform because new forms of power, authority, and governance must be created to fill the space that is created by the shrinking, neoliberal state—a point we will address in more detail later in this introduction. One of the key outcomes of the shrinking neoliberal state is the opening of new markers through the privatization of public goods and services: Within the neoliberal framework public goods and services that were once provided by the state are converted into new markets ripe for exploitation and profiteering by private/ corporate interests. Thus, we see major institutions associated with the military, the medical industry, systems of public education, and social services, among others being opened up as capital foraccumulation by private interests. Indeed, this has been a central feature of neoliberalism (to varying degrees) in capitalist economized throughout the world (Harvey, 2007). Neoliberal privatization thus seeks to turn all things public into profitable markets, oftentimes through the outsourcing of formerly public services to private corporations (see, e.g., Burch, 2009), and initiate a process where, “Entire sectors of the social reproduction side of the welfare state, most critically in health care and education, are being rapidly capitalized as entrepreneurs search for new profitable markets” (Fabricant and Fine, 2013, p. 25). Harvey (2004a) calls this neoliberal movement of capital from public projects and intuitions into the coffers of private enterprises, “accumulation by dispossession” (p. 74), where the public is being dispossessed of its assets which are functionally being accumulated by wealthy elites. The shrinking of the neoliberal state, combines with the neoliberal commitment opening new markets through accumulation by dispossession of public assets, has particularly profound implications for public education in the United States and around the world in at least three ways. First, and in the rawest sense, the neoliberal reconfiguration of public education—as a state institution—is simply about giving entrepreneurs and corporations access to a new and potentially profitable market of public assets to which they did not previously have access. As Fabricant and Fine (2013) explain: In public education, we have witnessed the ascent of charter schools, virtual learning, market curricula development, and an expansive number of firms engaged in the measurement and assessment of teachers, with a host of entrepreneurs making large and small profits. More specifically, profit making extends from publishers capitalizing on the new standards- based testing curricula, to high- tech companies experimenting and testing their curricula interventions, to real estate operators leasing property at exhorbant fees, to alternative certification programs, and finally for- profit schools. Each of these fragments, pieces of profit- making, are part of a new “gold rush” to capitalize the $500 billion of public assets being redistributed from neighborhood k-12 public schooling to the marketplace. Second, the creation of the neoliberal public education marketplace reconfigures key aspects of educational policy and practice. Specifically, the neoliberal vision of public education is one of a competitive market where students, teachers, schools and administrators are ranked against each other using high- stakes, standardized test scores as the primary metric for comparison (Au, 2009). In this vision teachers’ unions are a barrier to the competitive hiring and firing of “good” or “bad” teachers—as determined by student test scores—and the teaching profession itself is deregulated through quick teacher training programs (i.e., Teach For America), resulting in both the deprofessionalization of teaching and an attack on university- based teacher education programs (Au, 2013; Kretchmar et al., 2014; Zeichner and Pena- Sandoval, 2015). Further, within the neoliberal revisioning, and as something akin to small businesses, public schools need to be deregulated and put into direct competition with each other for students by being turned into charter schools (run by charter management organizations and governed by appointed boards) to be judged, and potentially closed, also based on test scores (Apple, 2006; Fabricant and Fine, 2012). The third implication of the neoliberal state for public education revolves around the foundation discourse about, and the purposes of, education. For instance, the very language of educational burecracies has changed. Borrowing from the corporate sector, high- level district administrators are now referred to as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), and Chief Operations Officers (COOs), and instead of being concerned with growth in learning, schools are forced to meet growth targets and benchmarks in test scores. Students and parents are subsequently reframed as consumers/ customers and teachers, schools. And principals are similarly reframed as service providers (Apple, 2006; Au, 2009; Lipman, 2011). This neoliberal discursive shift does not stand alone, however. It also signals a more profound neoliberal shift in the purposes of education: Under neoliberalism the purpose of education increasingly shift to production of “human capital,” adding value,” and meeting the needs of the economy, rather than, for instance, serving the social good or meeting collective needs of communities (Lipman, 2011). Much like the struggle over the U.S. curriculum from 100 years ago—where different forces jockeys as to whether children would be mainly taught for job training or more humanistic ends (Kleibard, 2004)—we are in the midst of a similar struggle over what children should learn and what schools should prepare them to do with their lives. In the contemporary context of the U.S., public education has been declared in a crisis particularly compares to other countries, and thus needs to be completely restructures in order for the U.S. to gain supremacy both in the international test score rankings and in the global economy. While the actual research evidence does not support the existence of this exact crisis (Ravitch, 2013), we are experiencing a crisis in education of working class children generally and working class children of color even more sharply, with neoliberal education policies only exacerbating this crisis (Anyon, 1997; Fabricant and Fine, 2013; Lipman, 2011). Fabricant and Fine (2013) provide a good summary of the process and are worth quoting at length: Various social reproduction functions of the state, such as public schooling, as abandoned, creating the basis for policies that capitalize and redistribute formerly public assets to the private sector, while proliferating, for example, testing cultures as a cheapened substitute for other forms of education. Present education policies are decreasingly able either to produce meaningful academic growth or avert students’ dropping or being pushed out of school. Instead, local schools are underfinanced and pedagogically constrained; providing every- more degraded learning environments that lead students to early decisions of exit and dead- end jobs. Residents in the poorest communities of color who depend on public education to build the academic capacity and market competitiveness of their children are rendered even more marginal than in the recent past. The continued extraction of capital from the “commons” (regressive tax codes, budget cutting, capitalization of public schooling) only further delegitimizes public institutions in the eyes of individuals struggling to carve a better life out of ever- more hostile environments. Thus, the very purposes of education are redefined as for meeting the labor needs to global economic competition, but this purpose is a mirage because the conditions requires for a quality education are undermined by neoliberalism’s compulsion for restriction the state, cutting social spending, and draining resources from the public sector.
Capitalism is unsustainable and now is key to socialist organization
Geier and Sustar ‘16, *associate editor of the International Socialist Review; **labor editor of Socialist Worker and a frequent contributor to the ISR, (Joel and Lee, Fall, “World economy: The return of crisis,” International Socialist Review, Issue #102,
In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The crisis of neoliberalism- In past decades, mainstream economists would have sneered at such an analysis. These days, however, the more honest establishment economists are coming to grips with the fact that neoliberalism—the policies of privatization, deregulation, free trade, social- spending cuts, and union bashing that had delivered a long upward swing of the world economy between 1982 and 2007—does not offer a solution to the chronically depressed world economy.On the contrary, neoliberalism is increasingly seen to be at the root of the problem. In 2011, New York University economist Nouriel Roubini told the Wall Street Journal that “Karl Marx had it right. At some point capitalism can destroy itself. . . . We thought markets worked. They’re not working.”7 After five more years of weak economic growth, other mainstream economists also rejected the orthodoxy. Notably, Lawrence Summers, the former secretary of the US Treasury turned critic of establishment economics, now argues that the world economy is gripped by what he calls “secular stagnation,” his description of the prolonged period of weak growth. He concluded that the economic theory he taught for years is wrong.8 Two staff writers for the IMF— a training ground for neoliberal technocrats as well as a debt collection agency for Western banks—admitted that “aspects of the neoliberal agenda . . . have not delivered as expected.”9Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf asserted that if big banks had to be effectively nationalized during the 2008 crash, they should be considered wards of the state.10 Economist Robert Gordon’s latest book is titled The Rise and Fall of American Growth.11 The list could go on. The combination of economic and ideological crises has led directly to political ones. The impact of a new global slump on world politics is beyond the scope of this article. It must suffice to say that the polarization seen in the recent economic “good” years will continue. The flux in imperialist relations following the twin US defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq has ensured that the political consequences of a depressed world economy will be magnified. This includes revolution, counterrevolution, and civil war in the Middle East, the biggest refugee crisis in seventy years, the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing politics in Europe, and working-class resistance as seen in France and other countries. The continued crisis in the dominant political parties of both the older and newly industrialized nations is part of a process of political polarization that has produced political possibilities for both the Right and the Left.There is a left-wing electoral revival in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, as well as the victory of leftist Jeremy Corbyn in Britain’s Labor Party, which had been the pacesetter in European social democracy’s turn to neoliberalism. While the outcomes are varied—Greece’s Syriza capitulated to creditors, with Spain’s Podemos likely to face a similar challenge—anti-austerity politics were finding an expression at the ballot box. For their part, far-right parties—such as Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France and Norbert Hofer’s Freedom Party in Austria—are seeking electoral gains based on channeling popular anger over the economy against immigrants. But French unions’ big strikes and protests against anti-labor laws in 2016 highlighted the potential of working-class resistance and raised opportunities for the renewal of the Left within that struggle.12 In the United States, the economy and rising inequality fueled both the rise of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant “Make America Great Again” campaign and Bernie Sanders’s unexpected success in reintroducing socialism into mainstream US political discussion for the first time in decades. Of course, the capitalist class and its political representatives will not stand idly by as the world economy drifts from crisis to crisis. On the contrary, capital and the state will by turns try and contain, co-opt, or crack down against any serious challenge from below. US imperialism will develop a new strategy to reassert its power. At the same time, capital will grope towards some way to restructure the system to restore growth and profitability—which inevitably will mean intensifying class conflict. If neoliberalism succeeded in gutting Western social contracts and “partnership” labor-management relations, the next capitalist restructuring will attempt to shred what remains. In France, it is the El Khomri law to gut workers’ rights; in the United States, it is “entitlement reform,” a euphemism for cutting Social Security and Medicare. The stormy economic times ahead will only increase this political volatility and create both challengesand opportunities for a rebirth of revolutionary socialist politics and organization. The opportunities for such a revival are clear. But if socialists are to make a convincing case for their views, they must put forward an analysis of the current crisisand an understanding why it cannot be solved on a capitalist basis without even greater human suffering than we have seen in recent years.