Education, Values, Human Subjectivity, and Why Teaching Matters

I am tired and still not comfortable with the MAC.  Instead of writing about MTC directly (I will be teaching social studies) I am going to try to put into words something I was reading and scribbling about as I rode the bus from Iowa to Mississippi.

It goes to the core of why I think education is so important.

Conceived and pursued as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, the social sciences are devoted to a number of regulatory ideals, particularly notions of scientific objectivity and progress. In is in this sense that the social sciences are self-descriptively value neutral. An investigation of the history of these sciences reveals an increasing process of specialization in the various spheres of knowledge and their methodologies. Such specialization has reached a point where there seems little prospect of an informed and critical dialogue between said spheres. With critical dialogue minimal, thinking becomes unreflective or positivistic or both. It is questionable to what extent there remains a commitment to the regulative values of truth, rationality, and consensus and the normative ideal of an uncoerced domain of participatory debate and dialogue where these values could be fully realized.

To illustrate, one need only consider the social science of economics as practiced by the marginalist or neoclassical economists.

As a discipline economics finds its roots in British utilitarian political-economy and the Social Darwinism of the middle and late 19th century as well as a form of scientific positivism which attempts to establish absolute boundaries, often philosophically untenable, between empirical observations (facts) and normative incitements toward actions (values). Though the discipline pays homage to Adam Smith, Smith espoused something called "the labor theory value," an approach which economists, or that branch of economic thought being addressed here, no longer adhere to or teach.

Society is more than individuals, it is also the traditions, customs and institutions which shape and mold behavior. The social sciences have as their aim the study and understanding of these relations and their changes in the course of time. The discipline of economics is therefore a social science. Its subject matter is drawn from the field of production and distribution of the goods persons and communities produce so as to satisfy needs and desires, including the administrative apparatus that makes such activity possible. What these relations are, how they evolved, and how they continue to change in the totality of our other social relations would seem to be the indicated subjects of inquiry. However, economics is self-defined as a science which studies human behavior understood as rational self-interest pursuing definite ends through the acquisition of scarce means with alternative uses.

This is not a definition that is value neutral—no theory of human nature can achieve neutrality or be a mere fact. Moreover, this does not look much like a science of social relations. It purports to be a definition of a science of human behavior in general that views human activity not in terms of relations between persons and communities, but as conceptually discrete relations between individuals and economic goods, between individuals and things.

The modern economic conceptual apparatus is also intended to transcend any particular set of social relations, which means that social and historical content enter the picture (or the model) only incidentally, with all the relevant social content drained off a priori. Take the concept of wages: economic theory has redefined wages to mean the product imputable through human activity engaged in a productive process; thus, the self-employed artisan, the small peasant, independent farmers, corporate CEO's, Roman, Greek, or American colonial slave-owners, and the modern worker all earn "wages." Wages thus become a universal category of human life rather than a category relevant to a particular form of historically embedded human culture.

The productivity theorems—which are behind the concepts of wage and marginal productivity—are themselves entirely absent of social content. In this way the relation between worker and owner is obscured, the exchange relation between the two a mere technicality, a subsidiary to the main fact of scarcity. Class and struggle—for the eight-hour day, for unemployment insurance, for the right to organize—do not exist. Furthermore, when doing this kind of analysis it is very difficult to avoid assuming that marginal productivity is the right wage, the wage the worker would earn under a fair and just economic order.

The current state of affairs of economic analysis, including those on the nominal American political Left, such as Krugman and Stiglitz, leaves much to be desired. It gives a straitened view of the world and of our small place within it. Long ago I decided to abandon the terrain of received (neoclassical) economic doctrine, and to explore other methods of trying to understand and interpret the world. Reading Marx and those operating within that tradition has been part of that exploration. This project has been, and remains, at its core a fundamentally ethical pursuit: the unfounded and unanchored substantive, intrinsic good that guides my life consists of persons in possession of good will who are thus capable of acting as responsible moral agents, using ethical principles not only as rules for reflection on how we have lived and are living but also, and more importantly, as incitements as to how we can build a global civilization that, in manifold material and spiritual ways, recognizes, nurtures, affirms, and protects basic human dignity and the ecological systems in which we are embedded.

Of course, Marx, after 150 years of propaganda, is anathema to most Americans, with even those who think themselves educated familiar with only the Manifesto and not the multiple volumes of Das Kapital, the Grundrisse, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, or the work of thousands of sociologically orientated economists, both here and abroad.

Marx used the term capitalism to refer to the market-based, commodity producing economic system run by and for capital, the purchasing power used to hire wage-labor at a market determined price. The system is run by and for capital because the impetus to expand capital is the primary engine, with the satisfaction of human needs secondary, at best, and an obstacle to be overcome, at worst; that is, the satisfaction of human needs in a humane and ecologically sound manner appears merely and only as a positive externality of the search for profits—accumulation is for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production, with living labor a mere instrument, and dead labor (capital) the ultimate beneficiary.

That said, in Das Kapital, Marx’s theoretical framework leads to an analysis of capitalism as a closed system consisting of (largely) even historical bio-geographical development, both in terms of total population, the expansion of the proletariat and the spatial and temporal expansion of capital. Thus racism, nationalism, trade wars, inter-capitalist armed conflict, ecological crisis, religious and ethnic disputes, and colonial and imperial activity to open new markets are tangential to the main analysis by Marx of capitalism as a closed system where "capitalism is its own gravedigger" consequent its tendency (and Marx did call it a tendency) to result in economic and political crisis within the midst of mass poverty on the one hand and extreme wealth on the other.

Yet a more dynamic rendering of the same analytical framework could address itself to these problems. Such a rendering would also be forced to explain class struggle as it operates and functions at the level of the State and civic institutions, where such struggle is often either brutally beaten back (military and police action on strikers, jailing and murder of activists and organizers, etc.) or where it ameliorates, through education, the ballot box or armed struggle, many of the worst features of labor and environmental exploitation under capitalism (reductions in the working day and the work week, legislation on minimum rates of pay, vacations, and safety constraints, etc.). In his Grundrisse and in other volumes of Kapital, Marx hints at these factors, and a multitude of other fields of inquiry as well, but he never develops them formally or fully.

In his book The Limits to Capital, David Harvey gives such a rendering, though it is highly theoretical and lacks historical grounding, a defect he has, I believe, tried to remedy in his other works, specifically A Brief History of Neoliberalism and The New Imperialism. Harvey writes, on page xxiii, in his introduction to the 2006 Verso edition (all emphasis and bracketing are mine):

"The deeper problem, I argue in Chapter 7, is the tendency towards [capital] overaccumulation. Crises arise when the ever-increasing quantities of surplus value that capitalists produce cannot profitably be absorbed. The operative word here is ‘profitably’ (and I should make clear that this has nothing directly to do with the supposed law of falling profits). The evidence for this capital surplus line of argument is, I believe, overwhelming [sluggish real growth rates in the West over the last 40+ years plus surpluses of money-capital, recycled petro dollars, and "fictitious" capital in the form of paper IOU’s, which amount to Hypothetical Future Value Accounting, i.e., Enron accounting—what we see is not so much expansion of production per se but rather currency devaluations, capital write-offs, increases in rent seeking behaviors (oil, biogenetic material, etc.), the extension of consumer credit toward systems of debt peonage, attacks by capital on legislatively won worker rights and the like, and the re-emergence of Marx’s "primitive accumulation" under the auspices of the World Bank, the IMF, and other finance capital controlled institutions and mechanisms—in a word, globalization]. Capitalism arose out of surpluses piled up by localized groups of traders and merchants who pillaged the rest of the world at will from the sixteenth century onwards [quibble: others have argue that the roots of capital are in the 13th and 14th centuries, in Italy, etc.]. The industrial form of capitalism that arose in the late eighteenth century in Britain successfully absorbed these surpluses at the same time as it expanded them. Based on wage labor and factory production, the capacity for surplus-value absorption and production was internalized, systematized and enhanced in part by structuring the capitalist world more clearly and expansively around the capital-labor social relation [See The Making of the English Working Class]. This entailed the successful internalization of the forces of technological change and rising productivity to generate ever larger surpluses. Where could these surpluses be profitably deployed? "Crisis" is the name for the phases of devaluation and destruction of the capital surpluses that cannot profitably be absorbed [What used to be referred to as "the business cycle" in certain neoclassical circles]."

And now for this paragraph, one with, I think, much relevance to our current situation:

"Surplus capital can take many forms. There can be a glut of commodities on the market (hence the appearance of underconsumption)."

This is called "rising inventories" or a "slowdown in the retail sector" in the business press. This is the problem the Keynesians are trying to solve through transfer payments or increases in government spending.

"It can sometimes appear as a money surplus or as an excess of credit (hence the appearance of financial and monetary crises and of inflation). Or it can appear as surpluses of productive capacity..."

Idle factories, or "excess productive capacity" as the business press calls it—unemployment, shutting down plants, and periods of housing and currency devaluation come to mind.

"It can appear as an excess of capital invested in built environments...in other assets...or as a fiscal crisis of the State."

The housing boom and money lent to the multi-million dollar construction companies, now with not enough customers for those houses when the real estate bubble bursts—one example.

Another example: the Savings and Loan crisis of 1987 and Long Term Capital Management in the 1990's.

Another, and take note of this one: the cutting back of the social provisions of the welfare state and public expenditures on education, health, and built infrastructures such as roads and the like as the mechanisms of lending utilized by the State, the capital markets, dry up, become too costly, or undermine the nation-state or municipality itself in a way that citizens find unacceptable—the struggle in New York and in Europe in the 1970's and to a much lesser extent the US right now.

Two more examples: the dot com boom and collapse and the current debacle over Bear Stearns and sub-prime mortgages.

As you might have noticed, many of these problems are merely the obverse of one another: underconsumptionist tendencies can be remedied by transfer payments, large scale extensions of consumer credit, and debt spending by the State, bringing factories back on-line, though this appears to lead to destabilizing inflationary pressures, increasing State debt loads, personal bankruptcies, and, ultimately, pressure on the masses to accept a lower quality of life as the State cuts back spending on social provisions while servicing the public debt, itself owned by various capitals in the form of bonds, or, in contradistinction, the State can facedown the capital markets in an economy wide fiscal crisis, sometimes intentionally because of political leadership, sometimes unintentionally as the result of currency speculation and arbitrage, or what Stiglitz calls "hot money": Mexico ('80's), post-Soviet Russia, East Asia, Mexico again ('90's), South Korea, and Argentina all come to mind, just to name a few nation-states.

Of course such a crisis will often have awful consequences for the supra-majority of any given population, leading to losses of bargained for and democratically won social provisions, social unrest, period bouts of democratic violence, inflammations of fundamentalist religious belief, various types of racism and xenophobia, often directed at minorities, and the appearance of demagogues, utilizing all of the above, on the political scene. At the same time such a crisis leads to further concentration and centralization of capital—which is why Mellon said an economic crisis is when "capital returns to its rightful owner." For example, the built infrastructures, like homes, that can’t be sold at current pricing will be written down, and other capitalists, the ones who did not lose their shirts, will sweep in to pick them up.

Yet there is another "solution" to the problem of overaccumulation of capital, and it is a most unpleasant one.

Harvey again, page 419 (yes, we skipped hundreds of pages of analysis here):

"That class struggle and factional conflict assume a spatial, often territorial, aspect under capitalism is undeniable. Phenomena of this sort are often explained away as the product of deep-seated human sentiments—loyalties to place, the land, community and national civic pride, regionalism, nationalism, etc.—or of equally deep-seated antipathies between human groups founded in race, language, religion, nationality, etc. But the proceeding analysis allows us to explain the regionalization of class and factional struggle [among competing capitals and wage laborers] independently of such sentiments. I do not mean to imply by this that human sentiments play no role in interregional conflict...I simply want to assert that a material basis exists, within the circulation processes of capital itself, for interregional manifestations of class and factional struggle."

In other words, wars are often fought over access to markets, opening up new markets, access to waterways and other means of transporting people and goods, cheap labor power, and monopoly rents based in land or precious metals or other natural resources. This is obvious to the point of banality. Yet Harvey in this section is also making a much bolder claim, namely that the overaccumulation of capital requires capitals to seek what he terms "a temporary spatial fix" to the problem—competing expansions into underdeveloped regions of the world leading to the destruction of labor power [deaths of soldiers and civilians], built up infrastructures [bombing and the like of whole cities, communications networks, railroads, bridges and roads, etc], and the use and loss of capital that resides in military hardware, which then has to be replaced and paid for, often at "cost plus" agreements with private contractors, by the State, funded by the public treasury, itself operating in the red which capitals then use as a justification for the cutting of social provisions. Of course, capitals need not be aware of what they are doing for this analysis to be true, though I suspect, quite honestly, that some may well be, such as the institutional owners of GE and the big banking houses.

But that is pure speculation. Yet consider WWI.

W.E.B. Dubois, in an article entitled "The African Roots of War," located the struggle between Germany and the Allies over African gold, diamonds, cocoa, rubber, ivory, and palm oil, and he pointed out that such goods percolated downward to the English and European working classes, therein quelling class conflict within individual nation-states. In his campaign of 1912 President Wilson repeatedly said that domestic markets for American made goods no longer were sufficient, while a few years later Bryan praised Wilson for opening the doors of weaker countries to an invasion of American capital and American private enterprise—a spatial fix for domestic overproduction. (Years later, in 1934, General Butler, under oath and speaking of his service in several Latin American countries during this time period, would say that he was "nothing more than a muscle man for big business.") And as for the war itself, England was more and more a market for American goods and loans—Morgan loaned money to England to support the war effort, and thus Morgan had an interest in seeing England win any conflicts, lest Germany receive reparations and England renege on any loans.  Thus the U.S. enters the war, with all of the propaganda and dehumanization tactics—Liberty Cabbage, hatred of Junkers, etc.—that we are all too familiar with in our present situation.

But back to Harvey, page 442:

"Twice in the twentieth century, the world has been plunged into global war through inter-imperialist rivalries....the world experienced the massive devaluation of capital through physical destruction, the ultimate consumption of labor power as cannon fodder."

And on page 444:

"Marxists, ever since Luxembourg...have long been attracted to the idea of military expenditures as a convenient means to absorb surpluses of capital and labor power. The instantaneous obsolescence of military hardware, and the easy manipulation of international tensions into a political demand for the increase in defense expenditures [missiles in Poland, hardware to Colombia and Pakistan, etc], adds lustre to the idea. Capitalism, it is sometimes held, is stabilized through the defense budget, albeit it ways that rob society of more humane and socially worthwhile programs. This line of thinking is unfortunately cast in the underconsumptionist mould [Keynes and FDR’s New Deal]...but the present theory suggests a rather more sinister and terrifying interpretation of military expenditures: not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labor, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the levels of devaluation now required."

Thus the U.S. was saved from the unemployment and excess capacity of the Great Depression not by the public expenditures of FDR, which did not revive the economy, but rather through the War Planning Boards, millions of deaths in Europe and the Pacific, and the wholesale devaluation of capital and labor worldwide. And it appears that the internationalism and multilateralism of the post WWII period has run aground, with the populations of Europe and the U.S. unwilling to give up generations of material and social gains, yet simultaneously East Asia and the former colonies of the West, newly minted nation-states with their own baggage, seek entry themselves into the world markets—all the while why leaders here and there and elsewhere allow economic struggles to degenerate into a politics of regress, patriotism and nationalism. This global class struggle, played out worldwide and within regions and nation-states, runs the risk of dissolving into territorially based conflicts that can lead to global war or economic barbarism or both.

This is why education and an educated citizenry matters.  And this is why we must be teachers who are not merely competent but rather excellent.