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This blog has itself made regular use of the output from various think tanks, including such diverse bodies as the New Economics Foundation, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the Center for a Stateless Society, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Adam Smith Institute and the Cato Institute.
It has also looked a little into the goings-on of a few of them - including the current UK government's favourite, the Legatum Institute:
Futures Forum: Brexit: and Exeter's MP asking for scrutiny: and more news
Futures Forum: Brexit: and disaster capitalism
Futures Forum: How to fix the labour market: disruption, technological automation and the gig economy
And the granddaddy of them all, the Heritage Foundation - and it's associate the Heartland Institute:
Futures Forum: Climate change sceptics 'are losing their grip'
Futures Forum: Climate change: "Conservatives don’t hate climate science. They hate the left’s climate solutions"
These are the most influential today. The question is how they came to be so influential.
To start with Prof David Graeber of the LSE:
A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
Future Stop
In
retrospect, though, I think that later historians will conclude that the legacy
of the sixties revolution was deeper than we now imagine, and that the triumph
of capitalist markets and their various planetary administrators and
enforcers—which seemed so epochal and permanent in the wake of the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991—was, in fact, far shallower.
I’ll
take an obvious example. One often hears that antiwar protests in the late
sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures, since they did not
appreciably speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. But afterward, those
controlling U.S. foreign policy were so anxious about being met with similar
popular unrest—and even more, with unrest within the military itself, which was
genuinely falling apart by the early seventies—that they refused to commit U.S.
forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years. It took 9/11, an
attack that led to thousands of civilian deaths on U.S. soil, to fully overcome
the notorious “Vietnam syndrome”—and even then, the war planners made an almost
obsessive effort to ensure the wars were effectively protest-proof. Propaganda
was incessant, the media was brought on board, experts provided exact
calculations on body bag counts (how many U.S. casualties it would take to stir
mass opposition), and the rules of engagement were carefully written to keep
the count below that.
The
problem was that since those rules of engagement ensured that thousands of
women, children, and old people would end up “collateral damage” in order to
minimize deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers, this meant that in Iraq and
Afghanistan, intense hatred for the occupying forces would pretty much
guarantee that the United States couldn’t obtain its military objectives. And
remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this. It didn’t matter. They
considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than
to actually win the war. It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately
defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.
Clearly,
an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S.
military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure. But it raises an
intriguing question: What happens when
the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of
political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in
power?
In
most of the world, the last thirty years has come to be known as the age of
neoliberalism—one dominated by a revival of the long-since-abandoned
nineteenth-century creed that held that free markets and human freedom in
general were ultimately the same thing. Neoliberalism has always been wracked
by a central paradox. It declares that economic imperatives are to take
priority over all others. Politics itself is just a matter of creating the
conditions for growing the economy by allowing the magic of
the marketplace to do its work. All other hopes and dreams—of equality, of
security—are to be sacrificed for the primary goal of economic productivity.
But global economic performance over the last thirty years has been decidedly
mediocre. With one or two spectacular exceptions (notably China, which
significantly ignored most neoliberal prescriptions), growth rates have been
far below what they were in the days of the old-fashioned, state-directed,
welfare-state-oriented capitalism of the fifties, sixties, and even seventies.
By its own standards, then, the project was already a colossal failure even
before the 2008 collapse.
If,
on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think
of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly
effective. The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly
meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating
a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the world’s
inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but
they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and
not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we
happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about
it, this is a remarkable accomplishment.
How
did they pull it off? The preemptive
attitude toward social movements is clearly a part of it; under no conditions
can alternatives, or anyone proposing alternatives, be seen to experience
success. This helps explain the almost unimaginable investment in “security
systems” of one sort or another: the fact that the United States, which lacks
any major rival, spends more on its military and intelligence than it did
during the Cold War, along with the almost dazzling accumulation of private
security agencies, intelligence agencies, militarized police, guards, and
mercenaries. Then there are the propaganda organs, including a massive media
industry that did not even exist before the sixties, celebrating police. Mostly
these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a
pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple
despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Yet
these security systems are also extremely expensive. Some economists estimate
that a quarter of the American
population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending
property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in
line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight.
In
fact, most of the economic innovations of the last thirty years make more sense
politically than economically. Eliminating guaranteed life employment for
precarious contracts doesn’t really create a more effective workforce, but it
is extraordinarily effective in destroying unions and otherwise depoliticizing
labor. The same can be said of endlessly increasing working hours. No one has much time for political activity
if they’re working sixty-hour weeks.
It
does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes
capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would
actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means
always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign
against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire,
individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last
great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of
consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other
realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of
dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any
sense of an alternative future.
A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
But how did we come to accept this picture of how things are?
The
“Crisis of Democracy” and the Attack on Education
The
following is the first part of a series of articles, “Class War and the College
Crisis.”
By:
Andrew Gavin Marshall
The
“Crisis of Democracy”
In
the period between the 1950s and the 1970s, the Western world, and especially
the United States, experienced a massive wave of resistance, rebellion,
protest, activism and direct action by entire sectors of the general population
which had for decades, if not centuries, been largely oppressed and ignored by
the institutional power structure of society. The Civil Rights movement in the
United States, the rise of the New Left – radical and activist – in both Europe
and North America, as elsewhere, anti-war activism, largely spurred against the
Vietnam War, Liberation Theology in Latin America (and the Philippines), the
environmental movement, feminist movement, gay rights movements, and all sorts
of other activist and mobilized movements of youth and large sectors of society
were organizing and actively agitating for change, reform, or even revolution.
The more power resisted their demands, the more the movements became
radicalized. The slower power acted, the faster people reacted. The effect,
essentially, was that these movements sought to, and in many cases did, empower
vast populations who had otherwise been oppressed and ignored, and they
generally awakened the mass of society to such injustices as racism, war, and
repression.
For
the general population, these movements were an enlightening, civilizing, and
hopeful phase in our modern history. For elites, they were terrifying. Thus, in
the early 1970s there was a discussion taking place among the intellectual
elite, most especially in the United States, on what became known as the
“Crisis of Democracy.” In 1973, the Trilateral Commission was formed by banker
and global oligarch David Rockefeller,
and intellectual elitist Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Trilateral Commission brings
together elites from North America, Western Europe, and Japan (now including
several states in East Asia), from the realms of politics, finance, economics,
corporations, international organizations, NGOs, academia, military,
intelligence, media, and foreign policy circles. It acts as a major
international think tank, designed to coordinate and establish consensus among
the dominant imperial powers of the world.
In
1975, the Trilateral Commission issued a major report entitled, “The Crisis of
Democracy,” in which the authors lamented against the “democratic surge” of the
1960s and the “overload” this imposed upon the institutions of authority. Samuel Huntington, a political
scientist and one of the principal authors of the report, wrote that the 1960s
saw a surge in democracy in America, with an upswing in citizen participation,
often “in the form of marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and ‘cause’
organizations.” Further, “the 1960s also saw a reassertion of the primacy of
equality as a goal in social, economic, and political life.” Of course, for
Huntington and the Trilateral Commission, which was founded by Huntington’s
friend, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and banker David
Rockefeller, the idea of “equality as a goal in social, economic, and
political life” is a terrible and frightening prospect. Huntington analyzed how
as part of this “democratic surge,” statistics showed that throughout the 1960s
and into the early 1970s, there was a dramatic increase in the percentage of
people who felt the United States was spending too much on defense (from 18% in
1960 to 52% in 1969, largely due to the Vietnam War).[1]
Huntington
wrote that the “essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general
challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private,” and further:
“People no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had
previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise,
character, or talents.” He explained that in the 1960s, “hierarchy, expertise,
and wealth” had come “under heavy attack.” The use of language here is
important, in framing power and wealth as “under attack” which implied that
those who were “attacking” were the aggressors, as opposed to the fact that
these populations (such as black Americans) had in fact been under attack from
power and wealth for centuries, and were just then beginning to fight back.
Thus, the self defense of people against power and wealth is referred to as an
“attack.” Huntington stated that the three key issues which were central to the
increased political participation in the 1960s were:
social
issues, such as use of drugs, civil liberties, and the role of women; racial
issues, involving integration, busing, government aid to minority groups, and
urban riots; military issues, involving primarily, of course, the war in
Vietnam but also the draft, military spending, military aid programs, and the
role of the military-industrial complex more generally.[2]
Huntington
presented these issues, essentially, as the “crisis of democracy,” in that they
increased distrust with the government and authority, that they led to social
and ideological polarization, and ultimately, to a “decline in the authority,
status, influence, and effectiveness of the presidency.” Huntington concluded
that many problems of governance in the United States stem from an “excess of
democracy,” and that, “the effective operation of a democratic political system
usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some
individuals and groups.” Huntington explained that society has always had
“marginal groups” which do not participate in politics, and while acknowledging
that the existence of “marginality on the part of some groups is inherently
undemocratic,” it has also “enabled democracy to function effectively.”
Huntington identifies “the blacks” as one such group that had become
politically active, posing a “danger of overloading the political system with
demands.” Of course, this implies directly an elitist version of “democracy” in
which the state retains the democratic aesthetic (voting, separation of powers,
rule of law) but remains exclusively in the hands of the wealthy power elite.
Huntington, in his conclusion, stated that the vulnerability of democracy – the
‘crisis of democracy’ – comes “from the internal dynamics of democracy itself
in a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society,” and that what is
needed is “a more balanced existence” in which there are “desirable limits to
the indefinite extension of political democracy.”[3] In other words, what is
needed is less democracy and more authority.
The
Trilateral Commission later explained its views of the “threat” to democracy
and thus, the way the system ‘should’ function:
In
most of the Trilateral countries [Western Europe, North America, Japan] in the
past decade there has been a decline in the confidence and trust which the
people have in government… Authority has been challenged not only in
government, but in trade unions, business enterprises, schools and
universities, professional associations, churches, and civic groups. In the
past, those institutions which have played the major role in the
indoctrination of the young in their rights and obligations as members
of society have been the family, the church, the school, and the army. The
effectiveness of all these institutions as a means of socialization has
declined severely.(emphasis added)[4]
The
“excess of democracy” which this entailed created a supposed “surge of demands”
upon the government, just at a time when the government’s authority was being
undermined. The Trilateral Commission further sent rampant shivers through the
intellectual elite community by discussing the perceived threat of
“value-oriented intellectuals” who dare to “assert their disgust with the
corruption, materialism, and inefficiency of democracy and with the
subservience of democratic government to ‘monopoly capitalism’.”
The
Powell Memo: Protecting the Plutocracy
While
elites were lamenting over the surge in democracy, particularly in the 1960s,
they were not simply complaining about an “excess of democracy” but were
actively planning on reducing it. Four years prior to the Trilateral Commission
report, in 1971, the infamous and secret ‘Powell Memo’ was issued, written by a
corporate lawyer and tobacco company board member, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (whom President Nixon nominated to the Supreme
Court two months later), which was addressed to the Chairman of the Education
Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, representing American business
interests.
Powell
stipulated that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” and that,
“the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued…
gaining momentum and converts.” While the ‘sources’ of the ‘attack’ were
identified as broad, they included the usual crowd of critics, Communists, the
New Left, and “other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both
political and economic.” Adding to this was that these “extremists” were
increasingly “more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than
ever before in our history.” The real “threat,” however, was the “voices
joining the chorus of criticism [which] come from perfectly respectable
elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the
intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from
politicians.” While acknowledging that in these very sectors, those who speak
out against the ‘system’ are still a minority, Powell noted, “these are often
the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and
speaking.”[12]
Powell
discussed the “paradox” of how the business leaders appear to be participating
– or simply tolerating – the attacks on the “free enterprise system,” whether
by providing a voice through the media which they own, or through universities,
despite the fact that “[t]he boards of trustees of our universities
overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system.”
Powell lamented the conclusions of reports indicating that colleges were
graduating students who “despise the American political and economic system,”
and thus, who would be inclined to move into power and create change, or outright
challenge the system head on. This marked an “intellectual warfare” being waged
against the system, according to Powell, who then quoted economist Milton
Friedman of the University of Chicago
(and the ‘father’ of neoliberalism), who stated:
It
[is] crystal clear that the foundations of our free society are under
wide-ranging and powerful attack – not by Communists or any other conspiracy
but by misguided individuals parroting one another and unwittingly serving ends
they would never intentionally promote.[13]
Powell
even specifically identified Ralph Nader
as a “threat” to American business. Powell further deplored the changes and
“attack” being made through the courts and legal system, which began targeting
corporate tax breaks and loop holes, with the media supporting such initiatives
since they help “the poor.” Powell of course referred to the notion of helping
“the poor” at the expense of the rich, and the framing of the debate as such,
as “political demagoguery or economic illiteracy,” and that the identification
of class politics – the rich versus the poor – “is the cheapest and most
dangerous kind of politics.” The response from the business world to this
“broad attack,” Powell sadly reported, was “appeasement, ineptitude and
ignoring the problem.” Powell did, however, explain in sympathy to the
‘ineptitude’ of the corporate and financial elites that, “it must be recognized
that businessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerilla warfare
with those who propagandize against the system.”[14]
In
purporting that political scientists, economists, sociologists and many
historians “tend to be liberally oriented,” Powell suggested that “the need for
liberal thought is essential to a balanced viewpoint,” but that the ‘balance’
does not exist, with “few [faculty] members being conservatives or [of]
moderate persuasion… and being less articulate and aggressive than their
crusading colleagues.” Terrified of the prospects of these potentially
revolutionary youths entering into positions of power, Powell stated that when
they do, “for the most part they quickly discover the fallacies of what they
have been taught,” which is, in other words, to say that they quickly become
socialized to the structures, hierarchies and institutions of power which demand
conformity and subservience to elite interests. However, there were still many
who could emerge in “positions of influence where they mold public opinion and
often shape governmental action.” Thus, recommended Powell, the Chamber of
Commerce should make the “priority task of business” and its related
organizations “to address the campus origin of this hostility.” As academic
freedom was held as sacrosanct in American society, “It would be fatal to
attack this as a principle,” which of course implies that it is to be attacked
indirectly. Instead, it would be more effective to use the rhetoric of
“academic freedom” itself against the principle of academic freedom, using
terms like “openness,” “fairness,” and “balance” as points of critique which
would yield “a great opportunity for constructive action.”[16]
Thus,
an organization such as the Chamber of Commerce should, recommended Powell,
“consider establishing a staff of highly qualified scholars in the social
sciences who do believe in the system… [including] several of national
reputation whose authorship would be widely respected – even when disagreed
with.” The Chamber should also create “a staff of speakers of the highest
competency” which “might include the scholars,” and establish a ‘Speaker’s
Bureau’ which would “include the ablest and most effective advocates form the
top echelons of American business.” This staff of scholars, which Powell
emphasized, should be referred to as “independent scholars,” should then engage
in a continuing program of evaluating “social science textbooks, especially in
economics, political science and sociology.” The objective of this would “be
oriented toward restoring the balance essential to genuine academic freedom,”
meaning, of course, implanting ideological indoctrination and propaganda from
the business world, which Powell described as the “assurance of fair and
factual treatment of our system of government and our enterprise system, its
accomplishments, its basic relationship to individual rights and freedoms, and
comparisons with the systems of socialism, fascism and communism.” Powell
lamented that the “civil rights movement insist[ed] on re-writing many of the
textbooks in our universities and schools,” and “labor unions likewise
insist[ed] that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor.” Thus,
Powell contended, in the business world attempting to re-write textbooks and
education, this process “should be regarded as an aid to genuine academic
freedom and not as an intrusion upon it.”[17]
The
New Right: Neoliberalism and Education
The
Powell Memo is largely credited with being a type of ‘Constitution’ or
‘founding document’ for the emergence of the right-wing think tanks in the
1970s and 1980s, as per its recommendations for establishing “a staff of highly
qualified scholars in the social sciences who do believe in the system.” In
1973, a mere two years after the memo was written, the Heritage Foundation was founded as an “aggressive and openly
ideological expert organization,” which became highly influential in the Reagan
administration.[26]
The
Heritage Foundation’s website explains that the think tank’s mission “is to
formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of
free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American
values, and a strong national defense.” Upon its founding in 1973, the Heritage
Foundation began to “deliver compelling and persuasive research to Congress
providing facts, data, and sound arguments on behalf of conservative
principles.” In 1977, Ed Feulner became President of the foundation and
established “a new senior management staff” and a ‘resource bank’ in order “to
take on the liberal establishment and forge a national network of conservative
policy groups and experts,” ultimately totaling more than 2,200 “policy
experts” and 475 “policy groups” in the U.S. and elsewhere. In 1980, Heritage
published a “public policy blueprint” entitled, “Mandate for Leadership,” which
became “the policy bible of the newly elected Reagan administration on
everything from taxes and regulation to crime and national defense.” In 1987,
Heritage published another policy plan, “Out of the Poverty Trap: A
Conservative Strategy for Welfare Reform,” which, as their website boastfully
claimed, “changed the entitlement mentality in America, moving thousands off
the dole [welfare] and toward personal responsibility,” or, in other words,
deeper poverty.[27]
The
model of the Heritage Foundation led to the rapid proliferation of conservative
think tanks, from 70 to over 300 in over 30 years, which “often work together
to create multi-issue networks on the local, state, and federal level and use
mainstream and alternative media to promote conservative agendas.” The ultimate
objective, like with all think tanks and foundations, is “spreading
ideology.”[28]
The
Cato Institute is another
conservative – or “libertarian” – think tank, as it describes itself. Founded
in 1974 as the Charles Koch Foundation
by Charles Koch (one of America’s richest billionaires and major financier of
the Tea Party movement), as well as Ed Crane and Murray Rothbard. By 1977, it
had changed its name to the Cato Institute, after “Cato’s Letters,” a series of
essays by two British writers in the 18th century under the
pseudonym of Cato, who was a Roman Senator strongly opposed to democracy, and
had fought against the slave uprising led by Spartacus. He was idolized in the
Enlightenment period as a progenitor and protector of liberty (for the few),
which was reflected in the ideology of the Founding Fathers of the United
States, particularly Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, for which the Cato
Institute credits as the reasoning for the re-naming. While Enlightenment
thought and thinkers are idolized – most especially in the formation of the
U.S. Constitution – as advocates of liberty, freedom and individual rights, it
was the ‘right’ of ‘private property’ and those who owned property (which, at
the time, included slave owners) as the ultimate sacrosanct form of “liberty.”
Again, a distinctly elitist conception of democracy referred to as
‘Republicanism.’
These
right-wing think tanks helped bring in the era of neo-liberalism, bringing
together “scholars” who support the so-called “free market” system (itself, a
mythical fallacy), and who deride and oppose all forms of social welfare and
social support. The think tanks produced the research and work which supported
the dominance of the banks and corporations over society, and the members of
the think tanks had their voices heard through the media, in government, and in
the universities. They facilitated the ideological shift in power and policy
circles toward neoliberalism.
The
Powell Memo and the general “crisis of democracy” set out a political, social,
and economic circumstance in which neoliberalism emerged to manage the “excess
of democracy.” Instead of a broader focus on neoliberalism and globalization in
general, I will focus on their influences upon education in particular. The era
of neoliberal globalization marked a rapid decline of the liberal welfare
states that had emerged in the previous several decades, and as such, directly
affected education.
As
part of this process, knowledge was transformed into ‘capital’ – into
‘knowledge capitalism’ or a ‘knowledge economy.’ Reports from the World Bank
and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the
1990s transformed these ideas into a “policy template.” This was to establish
“a new coalition between education and industry,” in which “education if
reconfigured as a massively undervalued form of knowledge capital that will
determine the future of work, the organization of knowledge institutions and
the shape of society in the years to come.”[29]
Knowledge was thus defined as an “economic resource” which would give growth to the economy. As such, in the neoliberal era, where all aspects of economic productivity and growth are privatized (purportedly to increase their efficiency and productive capacity as only the “free market” can do), education – or the “knowledge economy” – itself, was destined to be privatized.[30]
Knowledge was thus defined as an “economic resource” which would give growth to the economy. As such, in the neoliberal era, where all aspects of economic productivity and growth are privatized (purportedly to increase their efficiency and productive capacity as only the “free market” can do), education – or the “knowledge economy” – itself, was destined to be privatized.[30]
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