CHAPTER 1

Endgames

Capitalism is a suicide pact.

-Noam Chomsky1

Education and sustainability

My thesis is that the neoliberal endgame is precisely that, anendgame. The neoliberal phase of capitalism advances a series ofmoves the execution of which causes the game to end; uponcompletion of its final sequence the players cannot continue.Though ultimately merely a symptom, neoliberalism representscapitalism's moving beyond its traditional concern withextracting labor's surplus value, i.e. worker exploitation, into aposture of worker elimination and, ultimately, eliminationsimpliciter: we ourselves, future generations, and much other lifeon earth. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy isprofaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses,his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Thissearing 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 aterminal phase. Yet few have understood until recently just howliterally that "terminal" needs to be taken. As the ideologicalexpression of the latest mutation of capitalism - a systemicallyhybridized monstrosity of state subsidy and oligarchic monopolism- at its deepest structural level neoliberalism amounts to anuncompromising thanatology. It is a death wish that has takenhold of our collective mentality. It will eliminate first the poorand otherwise vulnerable and then it will kill all of us as itdestroys the capacity of our planet to sustain human life. I meanthis not as hyperbole but as a sober extrapolation from presenteconomic and environmental trends. As John Bellamy Foster andcolleagues, in their study of capitalism's effect on theenvironment, warn: "the stability of the earth system as we knowit is being endangered. We are at red alert status."

There are more optimistic scenarios. But at the moment theseseem less probable. Unfortunately, sometimes it turns out thatthe news is bad and it may even lack the silver lining we seemalmost hardwired to try to locate. So many of us proceed like wedeserve a happy ending, as if by birthright. This sense of cosmicentitlement has a long intellectual history: from the Judaic self-understandingas God's "chosen" people, to the Aristotelian scalanaturae where humanity serves as biological telos, to theCalvinist-Puritan-American conviction that God will prosper hiselect, to today's suitably banal expectation for technological fixesthat "they" will figure out in order to deliver the Hollywoodhappy ending upon which "we" the audience insist. Humanbeings may even be hard-wired for a certain degree of psychologicalruddiness; speculative evolutionary rationales for thesurvival positivity of "high hopes" are easy to imagine (thoughdepression may have its own evolutionary rationale as well).But clearly optimism can delude, too. This calls to mindFriedrich Nietzsche's dangerous insight that at times truth can beinimical to life. "Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceivedreally less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous?" Thisattitudinal ambivalence pervades every worthwhile discussionof the realities of the neoliberal predicament in which we nowfind ourselves.

Take the critical notion of "sustainability" that is often quitereasonably offered in opposition to the present annihilative path.Every reasonable person should be in favor of sustainability. Butas a guide for action it can be misleading. Sustainability is largelya strategic notion. It tends to assume as static the desirability ofcertain outcomes and therefore frequently frames problems astechnical malfunctions needing appropriate technical fixes. If Idecry our present oil usage as "unsustainable," implicit in thatmessage is an imperative to locate an alternative energy source inorder to sustain the same activities fueled by the old energysource. What tends to be assumed is that our general way ofdoing things, our "lifestyle," needs to be preserved but by alternativemeans, in this case, say, by developing sources ofrenewable energy; we are not the problem, it is only our currentway of doing things that is to blame. As essayist Paul Kingsnorthpointedly puts it, "It means sustaining human civilization at thecomfort level that the world's rich people - us - feel is their right,without destroying the 'natural capital' or the 'resource base' thatis 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 degradedconsumer culture that ultimately sees itself as the universe'scenter.

In this crucial respect, the rhetoric of sustainability is inadequatefor describing the magnitude of what is at stake withneoliberalism and the comprehensive - and compounding damageit currently wreaks. The problem with "sustainability" inthe larger context of human survival is that it tends to understatematters. When resource depletion and environmental destructionare factored in, the neoliberal phase of capitalism is more thanmerely unsustainable. If it is allowed to play out its endgame, itwill not just alter our lives and cause us to seek new ways ofachieving what we currently desire. It will eliminate us, and whenwe exit, so will the sustainability question, as the question ofwhat is to be sustained and how to sustain "it" - namely, us - willno longer remain. In this sense, neoliberalism's endgame is notjust another problem for clever humanity to figure out and fromwhich to move on. In the parlance of our now endless war against"terror," it represents an existential threat, not a threat againstspecific practices or even our particular way of life as a whole. Itis a threat against life itself: our lives, certainly, and also muchother precious nonhuman life as well.

To illustrate the point, I could frame a life-or-death struggleagainst an assailant as a conflict over the "sustainability" of mylife. Once again this would be true but it is misleadingly understated.It would be more accurate to say that I am engaged in astruggle against being eliminated, where I may face the harshsurvivalist disjunction of either killing or being killed. The morechronic question of sustainability (and its strategies andsolutions) rightfully comes into play only once this more acutelife-or-death existential question has been decided. I contendthat this is where we are now finding ourselves with capitalismin its neoliberal phase; we have been enduring a chroniccondition that has recently turned acute in the life-or-deathsense. Consequently, we are subject to that harsh survivalistdisjunction: we will have to kill it before it kills us. And soon. For thepowerful imperatives for which neoliberal ideology providescover are actively destroying everything in their path, in acongeries of extractive processes that go well beyond the"creative destruction" ambivalently identified by Marx andcelebrated by capitalism's dead enders as an always right andnecessary manifestation of market forces. For creativedestruction has given way to just plain destruction - alone andfor 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, wherewe end up debilitated and conquered by that which we createdand over which we thought we had control, like the situationwith capital itself writ large. For its part, the Christian traditionmight see in all this destructive nihilism the figure of Satanmaking an audacious apocalyptic move. The scientist simplymeasures again and sees more and more clearly a planet in peril,one already ominously exceeding life's limits across whatleading 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 anypossible salvific response: education. Education comprises ahighly ambivalent set of practices in this connection: everythingfrom servicing capital accumulation as additive "human capital"to providing a potential seedbed for real resistance against thesame. Temporally, it is both a lagging and leading indicator, by itsvery nature showing us both past and future. Much that it accomplishesmerely reproduces the existing social order while at thesame time it also provides sites for the development of theinevitably altered rising generations. Further, it functions at boththe smallest scale of personal experience - from gestalt "aha!"moments to (reported) individual spiritual awakenings - while italso scales up as a sociologically larger phenomenon having to dowith mass government schooling, public awareness campaigns,policies having to do with the societal flow of information, andthe like. Education exists both formally in schools, workplacesand other institutions yet also informally in group and intimatesettings and in an almost infinite variety of popular media - all ofthe above instantiating education in its widest anthropologicalsense as the transmission of culture. Of course it also goes beyondtransmission in a static sense as well. The very act of transmissionoften generates novelty, as what is learned has its own appropriativeautonomy. And education is also almost always perhapsmerely always - what sets the scene for innovation anddiscovery. It is among the largest and most varied humanphenomena and the approaches to it are infinitely varied. Thereare "educational" aspects to everything. So some specificity isrequired in order to make meaningful claims.

Accordingly, a specific focus will be on education in one of itsmost formal and largest-scale aspects, namely, the enterprise ofuniversal public education that has become a definitivecomponent of the world's most developed economies. The qualifiers"universal" and "public" are of course perpetually contestedand have both meant different things in different eras anddifferent things to different parties in the same era. For example,there are always to be found unresolved but basic distributivequestions about who exactly gets this education and similarlyunresolved substantive questions concerning what precisely it isthat "they" are to get. Be all that as it may, the shorthand term forthis unwieldy grab bag of phenomena may be reducedaccurately enough to "schooling": a selective formalization ofongoing educational practices. Schooling itself has been arounda long, long time, perhaps in some form since the advent of thesettled communities made possible by agriculture some 10,000years ago. It obviously far predates capitalism. Its modern institutionalizedform, however, arose along with the labor needs ofnascent industrial capitalism, in the US things really took offwith the rise of factory production in the nineteenth century.Though not alone, capitalists quite clearly and deliberately builtthe institution of schooling as we now know it - along with theancillary legal framework of compulsory education thatsupports it. Although it contains plenty of its own internalpeculiarities, schooling's structural core has always consisted ofits economic functionality, including its service to the economicand political elites who typically coordinate that functionality. Sonobody should become doe-eyed about any alleged golden erawhere schools were bastions of authentic learning and civicideals. They have always been sites of both domination and, to atleast some extent, resistance - now no less than in earlier times.Schools therefore provide an interesting and ultimately tellingvantage point from which to observe the depredations of neoliberalism,as they function both as symptoms of those depredationsyet also as staging areas from which resistances constantlyarise, just as in the realm of production itself. It is in the natureof the thing to be both symptom and cause.

This traditionally dual aspect of schooling is also reflected inthe more personal experiences of education that are possible. Asthe practices of teaching and learning, it reflects the range ofhuman beings' moral capabilities and ambivalences. On the onehand we are causally determined playthings of larger forces whocan do no other than as we do. But on the other hand, from withinour own experience we ourselves undergo our lives as if wepossess the personal capability to exercise our will. Spinoza saysthat free will is merely an illusion caused by ignorance of thecauses of our actions. That may be true. But still, it is also truethat we nonetheless feel that we can act and probably are notcapable of ridding ourselves of that experience, however finallyillusory it may be, save perhaps in the extraordinary and fleetingepiphanies said to be achieved by the world's aesthetic andspiritual masters. As our illusions may surely damn us, it maywell prove that suitably transformed they may save us too. Thiscontradictory pedagogical "workshop where ideals are manufactured,"to use Nietzsche's phrase, are thus an appropriateprimary focus. It matters how we see ourselves.

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

Falling rates, instability, extraction

Neoliberalism deals eliminationist death in two interrelatedmodes:

1 as a function of internal economic contradictions rooted incapitalist production

2 as a function of external environmental contradictionsoccasioned by capitalist production

Current and future prospects for education must be understoodas profoundly shaped by both of these phenomena. EducationalThe Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgamepractices and institutions have some ideological autonomy. Buteducation at all levels currently labors under mercilessly severeconstraints supplied by neoliberalism along these two axes thathave become definitive of capitalism's current and so far mostdesperate phase.

First the internal economic contradictions. I will address twointerrelated themes that are, I believe, driving contemporaryevents, including the recent economic crisis:

The first of these is identified by Karl Marx as the counterintuitiveTRPF. Though typically hidden by an array of counterforces, the TRPF is the first of three root causes that I will discussthat all but guarantee late capitalism can only lurch from onecrisis to the next, to such an extent that it should be understoodthat 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 isarises from within the very internal dynamics of capitalistproduction, namely the interplay of technology and labor in theform of productivity and in the long-term ability of risingproductivity 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 DavidHarvey, until its recent resuscitation by prominent Marxisttheorists such as the late Chris Harman, Guglielmo Carchedi,Alex Callinicos and Andrew Kliman. Unusual for high Marxisttheory, the TRPF and associated ideas also enjoy an able popularizationin the compelling educational videos created by YouTubesensation Brendan Cooney as part of his Kapitalism 101 project.Through careful analysis of the relevant texts, especially the latervolumes of Capital, as well as supplementary empirical work onthe best available recent economic data in this very difficult area(see especially Kliman's analysis of relevant data onprofitability), these theorists in the ensemble make a convincingcase that since the 1970s, world capitalism has experienced anepochal change due largely to technological change and itseffects upon productivity. As shall be explained below, via theTRPF, these productivity increases have generated a crisis ofprofitability first in manufacturing and later in other sectors. Tobe sure, as Marx himself immediately pointed out, there aremany counter forces, to the extent that the counter forces becomein some sense a larger story - neoliberalism itself being one such.And it is, in my view, undecidable as to the precise extent theTRPF drives events. Economics simply isn't that "hard" a scienceas it claims to be - let alone predictive - beyond a certain level ofconfidence. Some Marxist proponents of the TRPF err in fact inthis scientistic direction. I have no stake in the "intestine wars" ofMarxist economics and there is good reason to be as wary ofMarxist sectarians as one should be of all sectarians because, bydefinition, they tend to end up valuing doctrinal purity overtruth. As a cautious philosophical outsider, then, I will contentmyself with a weaker and more defensible claim than isadvanced by some of the theory's proponents: the TRPF matters,and if it is not the reason capitalism is morphing into its deathspiral neoliberal phase, it is surely a reason.