Extractive Institutions
David Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame
Zero Books, 319pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781780995786
reviewed by Calum Watt
Last November saw the coalition government privatise almost £900 million of student debt. The debt comprised loans taken out during the 1990s, and so represents only a small portion of the total value of student loans. This total is estimated at £40 billion, all of which the government has indicated it plans to sell off. If you think this is just another innocuous step in the government’s project of ‘reducing the deficit’, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame may be the book to disabuse you of the idea.
David J. Blacker is a philosopher of education whose thesis goes far beyond the regular complaint that universities and schools are becoming increasingly marketised. Marketisation is a plain fact, as anyone who has recently written a funding application will be aware. But by taking a broadly Marxist view, Blacker forecasts a longer-term and much more pernicious change. It is not merely that we are seeing a change in the understanding of the purpose of education (that education is becoming increasingly transactional, that students consider themselves as consumers and their courses as commodities), but that the very possibility of education is changing.
The book’s title refers to the concept that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, a mainstay in Marxist economics. Marx’s abstract economic point is not, however, the main issue here: what Blacker calls the falling rate of learning is the political logic whereby when there is less need for labour (due to the globalised labour market, technological change and overpopulation), there is correspondingly less need for education. As a result, public educational institutions become subject to the same privatisation as other former public assets, such as healthcare, prisons and the post office. They become ‘extractive institutions’, a term that Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson coined in their 2012 bestseller Why Nations Fail, and defined as institutions which ‘extract income and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset’ — that different subset typically being shareholders and the wealthy elite. Privatisation is not, as its proponents like to claim, about competition or value for money.
Where does that leave students? The example of student loans in Britain gives an ominous indication of just exactly where. The government claims that repayment terms will not be retrospectively altered by the private companies buying the debt, but given that the recent history of higher education reform has consisted of a series of U-turns and broken promises one would be wise to treat this with scepticism, if not outright incredulity. For how else can the debt possibly be profitable to these companies? Blacker offers a dystopian vision of ‘a new era of debt servitude, even serfdom, where the very future possibilities of the young become existential carrion for the insatiably gluttonous financialised “vulture” capitals’. In a classic Master-Slave reversal, it is less that you own your education than that it owns you. Blacker concludes that ‘the young stare down the barrel of a neo-feudal future that looks, at best, bleak and disheartening.’
And it gets worse. According to Blacker, our historical moment is one in which the bulk of the population is no longer regarded as a resource to be exploited through labour (bad as that might have been), but as a surplus to be disposed of. This is perhaps the most contentious aspect of Blacker’s thesis: the notion of ‘educational eliminationism’. Appropriating the latter word from the work of Holocaust scholars such as Daniel Goldhagen, Blacker provocatively compares the ‘moral structure’ in which neoliberalism effectively writes off swathes of the young as surplus to contemporary capitalist requirement (and therefore not worth investing in) to the Nazi policy following the Wannsee Conference of 1942, in which Jews were no longer to be exploited as slaves before being murdered in concentration camps, but simply subjected to the most direct extermination possible. This kind of rhetoric — which is typical of the book as a whole — may seem extreme and offensive, but its purpose is precisely to be alarming and to challenge the narrative which the author believes too many have accepted at face value — that austerity is necessary, that we are all in it together, and so on. The point of this particular analogy, it is stressed, is not that the youth are going to be eradicated — that would be obscene — but that they have been effectively written off vis-à-vis the ruling class. Blacker would doubtless consider the Conservatives’ plans to deny housing benefit to unemployed under-25s, at a time of record youth unemployment, as exemplary of the ideological construction of the young as disposable.
In many ways this is the kind of work a rightwing commentator who doesn’t read Marxist books might imagine a Marxist book to be — hyperbolic, denunciatory, apocalyptic. In fact, Blacker’s heavily fatalistic tone is what distinguishes The Falling Rate of Learning from even the more extreme contemporary leftist critiques. The ‘endgame’ of the title really is intended to suggest that neoliberalism is driving the world to terminal ruin — neoliberalism is a ‘thanatology’, and with regard to it we are collectively in a life or death situation. The book is nominally a work on the state of education in the Western world, but a recurring argument is that the damage being done to the environment is such that soon there might not be a world left. The problem is the result of systemic properties of the global neoliberal operation and, barring an unlikely overthrow of capitalism, looks irreversible.
Blacker’s Marx is one ‘tempered with the Dantean ability to counsel despair’. The process is too far gone and there is little — to bring us back to universities — that academics can do to stop it; as he slightly disarmingly puts it, ‘education activism does not matter and is a waste of time’. His analogy is with prisons: prison guards may have the potential to achieve minor changes, but not the systemic overhaul required. Education is fated to go down in this way and efforts are better directed outside institutions — as the author says, ‘better an unofficial blog or an occupy protest than a speech at a faculty meeting or a petition to an administrator’. This is all to say that what is missing from the sloganeering of the anti-capitalist left is a dose of stoicism. The thought of Seneca, rather than of any Marxist, is invoked in the final chapter of the book. While something unexpected and game-changing may come about, we had best prepare for the coming storm and salvage what we can.
Blacker is a professor at the University of Delaware and his book speaks primarily to the American experience. If you want to read a more conservative critical account of marketisation within the context of British universities, I recommend Stefan Collini’s recent essay in the London Review of Books (‘Sold Out’, 24 October 2013). But given that our education system seems to be heading in a similar direction to that of the US — and Blacker’s references to the ‘increasingly Gradgrindian UK’ are not reassuring — The Falling Rate of Learning ought to be read as a warning of things to come.
David J. Blacker is a philosopher of education whose thesis goes far beyond the regular complaint that universities and schools are becoming increasingly marketised. Marketisation is a plain fact, as anyone who has recently written a funding application will be aware. But by taking a broadly Marxist view, Blacker forecasts a longer-term and much more pernicious change. It is not merely that we are seeing a change in the understanding of the purpose of education (that education is becoming increasingly transactional, that students consider themselves as consumers and their courses as commodities), but that the very possibility of education is changing.
The book’s title refers to the concept that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, a mainstay in Marxist economics. Marx’s abstract economic point is not, however, the main issue here: what Blacker calls the falling rate of learning is the political logic whereby when there is less need for labour (due to the globalised labour market, technological change and overpopulation), there is correspondingly less need for education. As a result, public educational institutions become subject to the same privatisation as other former public assets, such as healthcare, prisons and the post office. They become ‘extractive institutions’, a term that Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson coined in their 2012 bestseller Why Nations Fail, and defined as institutions which ‘extract income and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset’ — that different subset typically being shareholders and the wealthy elite. Privatisation is not, as its proponents like to claim, about competition or value for money.
Where does that leave students? The example of student loans in Britain gives an ominous indication of just exactly where. The government claims that repayment terms will not be retrospectively altered by the private companies buying the debt, but given that the recent history of higher education reform has consisted of a series of U-turns and broken promises one would be wise to treat this with scepticism, if not outright incredulity. For how else can the debt possibly be profitable to these companies? Blacker offers a dystopian vision of ‘a new era of debt servitude, even serfdom, where the very future possibilities of the young become existential carrion for the insatiably gluttonous financialised “vulture” capitals’. In a classic Master-Slave reversal, it is less that you own your education than that it owns you. Blacker concludes that ‘the young stare down the barrel of a neo-feudal future that looks, at best, bleak and disheartening.’
And it gets worse. According to Blacker, our historical moment is one in which the bulk of the population is no longer regarded as a resource to be exploited through labour (bad as that might have been), but as a surplus to be disposed of. This is perhaps the most contentious aspect of Blacker’s thesis: the notion of ‘educational eliminationism’. Appropriating the latter word from the work of Holocaust scholars such as Daniel Goldhagen, Blacker provocatively compares the ‘moral structure’ in which neoliberalism effectively writes off swathes of the young as surplus to contemporary capitalist requirement (and therefore not worth investing in) to the Nazi policy following the Wannsee Conference of 1942, in which Jews were no longer to be exploited as slaves before being murdered in concentration camps, but simply subjected to the most direct extermination possible. This kind of rhetoric — which is typical of the book as a whole — may seem extreme and offensive, but its purpose is precisely to be alarming and to challenge the narrative which the author believes too many have accepted at face value — that austerity is necessary, that we are all in it together, and so on. The point of this particular analogy, it is stressed, is not that the youth are going to be eradicated — that would be obscene — but that they have been effectively written off vis-à-vis the ruling class. Blacker would doubtless consider the Conservatives’ plans to deny housing benefit to unemployed under-25s, at a time of record youth unemployment, as exemplary of the ideological construction of the young as disposable.
In many ways this is the kind of work a rightwing commentator who doesn’t read Marxist books might imagine a Marxist book to be — hyperbolic, denunciatory, apocalyptic. In fact, Blacker’s heavily fatalistic tone is what distinguishes The Falling Rate of Learning from even the more extreme contemporary leftist critiques. The ‘endgame’ of the title really is intended to suggest that neoliberalism is driving the world to terminal ruin — neoliberalism is a ‘thanatology’, and with regard to it we are collectively in a life or death situation. The book is nominally a work on the state of education in the Western world, but a recurring argument is that the damage being done to the environment is such that soon there might not be a world left. The problem is the result of systemic properties of the global neoliberal operation and, barring an unlikely overthrow of capitalism, looks irreversible.
Blacker’s Marx is one ‘tempered with the Dantean ability to counsel despair’. The process is too far gone and there is little — to bring us back to universities — that academics can do to stop it; as he slightly disarmingly puts it, ‘education activism does not matter and is a waste of time’. His analogy is with prisons: prison guards may have the potential to achieve minor changes, but not the systemic overhaul required. Education is fated to go down in this way and efforts are better directed outside institutions — as the author says, ‘better an unofficial blog or an occupy protest than a speech at a faculty meeting or a petition to an administrator’. This is all to say that what is missing from the sloganeering of the anti-capitalist left is a dose of stoicism. The thought of Seneca, rather than of any Marxist, is invoked in the final chapter of the book. While something unexpected and game-changing may come about, we had best prepare for the coming storm and salvage what we can.
Blacker is a professor at the University of Delaware and his book speaks primarily to the American experience. If you want to read a more conservative critical account of marketisation within the context of British universities, I recommend Stefan Collini’s recent essay in the London Review of Books (‘Sold Out’, 24 October 2013). But given that our education system seems to be heading in a similar direction to that of the US — and Blacker’s references to the ‘increasingly Gradgrindian UK’ are not reassuring — The Falling Rate of Learning ought to be read as a warning of things to come.