Anti-Capitalist Fake-ism

"I for one find the Times less alienatingly bourgeois than the Guardian."

Haha, excellent - another one falls foul of Tea's Law: 'Use of the word "bourgeois" as a handy catch-all smear is pretty much the most bourgeois thing you can possibly say'.

Burchill, also, a tiresome self-satisfied wannabe-working-class inverted snob.

massrock said:

Maybe this is really obvious, and possibly a bit unfair, but might a preoccupation with 'diagnosing our predicament' not sometimes be a reflection of a more personal situation unrecognised, or disavowed ('it's not me - it's capitalism'), as such, projected outwards?

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that is unfair, full stop. however, it's esp. pernicious in this context b/c it's an ad hominem attack that has long been hurled against radicals of all stripes. ted kaczynski comes to mind as an extreme case; before he was caught the media romanticized the hell out of him, this mysterious revolutionary figure. then once it came out he had a beard and lived off the grid in a cabin in the woods in Montana, he was "crazy". it was an unhappy childhood, an inability to make friends, etc - anything but his actual - agree or not - critique (tbc I'm not defending the man or his actions, just pointing out the way in which this charge - that it's merely personal problems - is used to undermine & marginalize). I don't doubt that the personal plays a role in everything, how could it not? I don't care one way or the other about k-punk but it's unfair to suggest that he or anyone else is motivated simply by bitterness - you've no idea, nor do I - as well as a convenient way to sidestep whatever they have to say.

poetix said:

A point worth bearing in mind here is that much of Capitalist Realism isn't concerned with markets as such, but with the marketisation of things that aren't markets and can only be treated as markets by systematically deforming them from the inside out. This is a fairly common complaint of people who've worked in the English education system

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I think (hope) that I can speak to this.

For those that don’t know, when Labour came to power in 1997, they wanted ramp up spending on education. To do this, they looked around for an intellectual framework that might justify their policies to the public and to the sector itself. The “marketisation” of education under Nu Labour should be understood as the product of a particular strain of politicians and their desires (improving social welfare; keeping power), and a number of theoretical, academic worldviews (namely, school effectiveness and school improvement). Meat meets machine—like the Bolshevik revolution or the use of the Gaussian copula model to price collateralised debt obligations.

Among other things, politicians understood school effectiveness and school improvement as explanations for how they could use indicators to justify spending increases to the public. If everyone is improving on their performance measures, then—to torture this metaphor some more—the return on investment is good and we are making a profit. The public will love us. We will get re-elected. The theory provides intellectual cover for policy decisions (increasing spending on education) and a framework for evaluating their success.

So the “marketisation” of education turns out to have been carried out for fairly traditionally leftist goals, as well as the generic aim of political survival. But these purposes notwithstanding, to what extent did the reforms really “marketise” education? It all depends on what you mean. Labour expanded education as a proportion of government outlays, which is not normally how one goes about reducing the influence of the state and increasing the influence of markets. What they did was try to some extent to do something that is comparable to what markets do. They tried to make improvements quantifiable. Like a company’s net profit, a school’s league table position or value added score tells us whether they are a winner or a loser, successful or unsuccessful. And so we hope that something like market discipline is introduced into the equation. Of course, the reality is actually pretty fucked up. But education should not be confused with an actual market. The "marketisation of education" is just a metaphor (if a popular one) that describes its reorientation along performance-based lines in order to justify spending increases. It is not literally true. There is no market for education that wasn’t there before New Labour took power. There is no market for education inside the state-dependent school system.

Oh and,

He argues, convincingly using the theory of Marxist economist Christian Marazzi, that when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 20 points on October 6th 1979, a shift was made to the Post-Fordist industrial climate and employment was increasingly out-sourced.

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Really?

There has been a marketisation of health, though, with private providers being invited in, patients being given a choice of hospitals to go to, hospitals being "paid by results" (which weren't results at all, but quantities of operations carried out). This all happened at the secondary care level (ie hopitals) not primary (GPs) or pubic health.

vimothy said:

I think (hope) that I can speak to this.

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[snip]

nice one Vim, very interesting.

must admit i was earlier thinking specifically of controversies around PFI and the NHS when Poetix mentioned market metaphors (and market knowledge carried over from private sector 'gurus' coming into the public sector etc) intruding into the public sector; any health professionals have two c on PFI?

vimothy said:

I think (hope) that I can speak to this.

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I'm curious as to what you'd have to say about the privatization of prisons (Wackenhut etc), transportation (i.e. British Rail or the FNM in Mexico), utilities (i.e. Bechtel's misadventures in Bolivia), etc. the first category are a huge business in the U.S.

I dunno about whether any of them represent true markets or whatever. I also dunno about a term like "marketization". but most of what I've read over the years suggests that perfomance suffers w/privatization and the main benefit - efficiency, cutting costs, etc. - often doesn't materialize either.

So far as I can remember, the Tories were enthusiastically introducing "choice" into the education system somewhat before the election that brought Labour to power; there I think the basic idea was to use the principle of competition to drive efficiency (the Tories, unlike Labour, wanted to spend less on state education). Neither they nor Labour ever wished to introduce a real market into education (although the Tories come closer to it, with ideas like giving out "vouchers" that can also be used to purchase private education), but "marketisation" in this context is not literal transformation into a market.

The system we now have, with league tables and intense competition between middle class parents for places in the "best" schools, has several market-like properties, but none of what you might call the "good" ones.

poetix said:

So far as I can remember, the Tories were enthusiastically introducing "choice" into the education system somewhat before the election that brought Labour to power; there I think the basic idea was to use the principle of competition to drive efficiency (the Tories, unlike Labour, wanted to spend less on state education). Neither they nor Labour ever wished to introduce a real market into education (although the Tories come closer to it, with ideas like giving out "vouchers" that can also be used to purchase private education), but "marketisation" in this context is not literal transformation into a market.

The system we now have, with league tables and intense competition between middle class parents for places in the "best" schools, has several market-like properties, but none of what you might call the "good" ones.

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this seems right to me. the idea behind much of the rhetoric was that education would operate like a market, without actually being one. good schools would prosper, and poor ones (i.e. ones parents didn't want their kids to go to) would lose numbers and eventually change their ways, or close.

But the adoption of the tennets of school effectiveness and school improvement and the heavy swing towards a "culture of performativity", as they say round here (not in the ANT sense--in thet sense of the regime of league tables and testing) was a New Labour thing.

I used to work for an academic who was mapping (a la Bourdieu) the field of School Leadership. I've read hundreds of pages of interviews with senior civil servants, politicians, academics and practitioners, and they were all pretty clear about this.

Sure - I mean, it was one of my dad's pet groans that after the first Labour election victory, things actually unbelievably got worse (in terms of levels of govt intervention and managerialist crapola) in education.

Kind of ironic that despite all the bluster about making education function more like a market, New Labour seem to have, if anything, made education more bureaucratic and managerialist.

In any case, I'm not convinced that the analogy is helpful. NuLab messed with the incentive structure and largely got what they should have expected: and education system geared towards teaching people to pass exams, and then patting itself on the back and noting how good its students are at passing exams.

It reminds me of the Wire. It's all about the stats, at the end of the day.

vimothy said:

In any case, I'm not convinced that the analogy is helpful. NuLab messed with the incentive structure and largely got what they should have expected: and education system geared towards teaching people to pass exams, and then patting itself on the back and noting how good its students are at passing exams.

It reminds me of the Wire. It's all about the stats, at the end of the day.

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Not wholly true - it was also about pushing as many late-teens as feasible into higher education.

crackerjack said:

Not wholly true - it was also about pushing as many late-teens as feasible into higher education.

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God, how did anyone with half a brain ever think this was a good idea?

I'm sure you've all read about the report that came out the other day saying that a degree adds only £100k to your expected earning potential over the course of a lifetime...

(...cue vim's anecdotal tidbit that a humanities degree actually subtracts from your earning potential!)

Not that how much money you stand to make is the best indication of the value of higher education, but it's surely an important part of it and an indicator for the value of less tangible benefits (or the lack thereof).

vimothy said:

With respect to Woebot, this is bullshit.

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I'd agree, unless we are talking X-Factor.

Mr. Tea said:

God, how did anyone with half a brain ever think this was a good idea?

I'm sure you've all read about the report that came out the other day saying that a degree adds only £100k to your expected earning potential over the course of a lifetime...

(...cue vim's anecdotal tidbit that a humanities degree actually subtracts from your earning potential!)

Not that how much money you stand to make is the best indication of the value of higher education, but it's surely an important part of it and an indicator for the value of less tangible benefits (or the lack thereof).

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Right, but their ideas were shaped by massive youth unemployment in the 80s and a concomitant rise in crime.

crackerjack said:

Right, but their ideas were shaped by massive youth unemployment in the 80s and a concomitant rise in crime.

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Sure, but wasn't that mainly to do with the collapse of traditional industries like manufacturing and mining? I.e. a mass-laying off of working-class people (mainly men, I guess) whose kids, a generation later, would probably not be able to afford a university education anyway, what with the abolition of grants, the introduction of fees and general rise in the cost of living, especially rented accomodation.

My complaint is not a novel one: just an observation that going to university has become a middle-class 'rite of passage' and that it's necessary to have a degree for many kinds of jobs - many kinds of totally ordinary jobs that wouldn't have required one a generation ago - as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy due to the fact that 'everyone has a degree these days' (and an enormous concomitant debt).

I'm not disagreeing with you - I just think making exams easier was as much to do with reducing youth unemployment stats as convincing parents their kids had all excelled at school.

People used to make music because they wanted to touch the stars, stick it to the man, tear up the place, chant down Babylon, explore new possibilities**, or to lose themselves in Dionysian abandon on the dancefloor. Now they do it to be a "big man" or "a famous person" or "rich" or - and this is the most pervasive and specious example of Capitalist Realism with regards to music- "a career".

The "non-mainstream" has been afflicted with its own strain of Capitalist Realism. The extremely unhealthy embrace of business concepts like "the long tail" and "narrow-casting" has wiped out the underground's ability to communicate universally, fostering as it does self-serving enclaves ever decreasing in scale. We might not sell shed-loads of records - but we know what our market is! So many small label bosses now view themselves with a certain amount "professional" pride as respectable small businessmen.

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The problem with Naomi Klein/Adbusters/much of anarchism (at least the studenty brand in the U.S.) is that its criticism is largely aesthetic. I don't have a problem with critiquing capitalism on an aesthetic level (indeed, I think this is what Kpunk does best), but the critique has to move on, or you end up with the quotation above, all elitism and romanticism about how things used to be better (or at least kewler), no class component, no way towards larger movements and mobilization. The huge risk is that it descends into how lame hipsters/jocks/yuppies are, individualist hipper-than-thou griping with an edgy anti-capitalist lining. Che Guevara T-shirts to the next level.

Kpunk flirts with this, sometimes gets beyond it. I haven't read the book, but for what it's worth I think criticizing a writer for promoting their book to their blog audience is pretty silly. I don't know how big this Zero Books alterna-brand is in the UK but it's basically unknown in the states, so I don't think you can fit it into some "long tail" hypocrisy. Anyway, the revolution will require some sexy branding and graphic design, right?

The above quote above is telling, a problem that I have with K-punk (though I realize this is Woebot talking) is the nostalgia for the Keynesian socialist state and the cool underground music that went along with it. It's complete romanticism -- the above quotation was never true, and is a gross simplification wrapped up in a fair amount of unexamined nostalgia for youth. I mean, the two paragraphs contradict each other just on the face of it.

crackerjack said:

Not wholly true - it was also about pushing as many late-teens as feasible into higher education.

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Well, yeah. That's what I said. Isn't it?