PedagogyOfHumanCapital

Pedagogy of Human Capital

  It is all too clear that education has become a way for rich nations to
  manage class conflicts, either through keeping people off the
  unemployment register, or through seducing their populations into the
  idea that they can all be middle class, working class becoming an
  attribute of newly industrialised nations like China or India, or an
  immigrant work force. Within this ideology, failure is educational
  failure. The idea that contemporary education is characterised by the
  move away from authoritarian forms of indoctrination and towards forms
  of self-directed or autonomous learning is perhaps the most powerful
  emancipatory ideology in this context. "Life long learning" is
  exemplary. The phrase oscillates between the dream of fulfilling
  self-transformation beyond the privileges of youth, and the nightmare of
  indiscriminate de-skilling and re-skilling according to the dictates of
  a żflexibleż labour market. It modifies the ideology of meritocracy,
  which is perhaps the core educational ideology through which the
  contradictions of capitalism and democracy are recoded as the successes
  and (more usually) "failures" of disciplined individualism: "life long
  learning" extends "meritocracy" to the whole of your life. Qualification
  is a receding horizon; its promise of maturity takes the form of
  infantalisation.

  Many of these educational phenomena coalesce in the socio-political
  characterisations that have gained increasingly insistent currency since
  the 1960s: post-industrial society, neo-liberalism, cognitive
  capitalism, immaterial labour, bio-politics. The socio-economic
  qualities indicated by these terms - the emphasis on white collar labour
  and the service economy, and the significance of high-tech knowledge and
  its socio-economic relations or networks; the de-regulation of labour
  markets, making labour more pliable to the demands of markets; the
  commodification of areas of society traditionally considered outside the
  economy or market, extending the demands of the production and
  reproduction of labour power to all aspects of social and natural life;
  the demand for increased self-discipline and initiative, if not
  creativity, in wage labour; and the emergence of new terms of political
  struggle and dispute over capitalism and its limits \u2013 all provide
  an increasingly familiar context for articulating the transforming
  pressures on education today. Indeed, it is evident that education is at
  the core of these formations. Just as we can draw parallels between the
  traditional school and the factory, so we can between the dispersal of
  the factory into society as a whole and the dispersal of the school. The
  expansion of education is the conduit for the transformation of wage
  labour, entwined with the procurement of a new kind of labourer and
  even, some would say, a new kind of human being. Gary S. Becker won the
  Nobel Prize in economics for his study of \u2018human capital\u2019,
  understood as the economic value of educational qualifications.[1] The
  term has since acquired a bio-capitalist currency, standing at the
  centre of political-philosophical disputes over the commodification of
  human beings. Rather than the capitalisation of education, it has come
  to indicate the educationalisation of capital.

  [...]

  In short, the autonomy aspired to by emancipatory education has turned
  out to involve points of indifference to the autonomy required of new
  capitalist work. This has profound implications. Crucially, it is
  entwined with fundamental transformations at stake in the relation of
  capitalism to life. If education has become the means through which
  advanced capitalist societies extend the subsumption of labour under
  capital to the subsumption of all aspects of social life, then the issue
  of emancipatory education needs to be understood in terms of this
  radical alteration to capitalism's metabolism.

  So, if we ask what an emancipatory education should be today, we are led
  to questions about changes in the basic structure of capital. This may
  sound reductive to those seeking a stronger independence of educational
  concerns from economic matters, but this independence must be wrested
  from out of the social fact of this reduction. Moreover, there is a
  reverse determination revealed here, of capitalism itself as an
  educational form, a pedagogy.

  [...]

  Core pedagogical concepts and forms, such as żruleż, żfreedomż,
  żsubjectż, żautonomyż, and so on, are already involved in capitalismżs
  fundamental antagonistic relation between capital and living labour,
  where capital exploits the powers of living labour, appropriating the
  production of surplus value. Capital aspires to autonomy in this
  relation; a self-valorisation in which it creates its own value,
  reducing labour to its rule and its interiority.

  [...]

  But capital, for Marx at least, is ultimately incapable of autonomy. It
  remains intrinsically dependent on living labour, which is actually
  creative of value. Autonomy is rather the potential of living labour,
  not capital. The struggle of labour against capital is therefore a
  struggle against the rule of capital, against labour\u2019s external or
  heteronymous determination by capital, and for labour\u2019s
  self-determination, its autonomy.

  [...]

  What is at stake here is the intensification of capitalżs subsumption of
  labour ż extending it beyond the industrial restructuring of labour
  processes diagnosed by Marx, and even beyond his discernment of an
  expanded realm of productive labour that incorporates various social and
  scientific supplements of the labour process ż to the subsumption by
  capital of life itself. In other words, the colonisation by capital of
  all those aspects of living labour that were previously deemed outside
  the labour process, from leisure and the environment, to sex and
  physiology, and certainly education. The consequences for the struggle
  against capitalism are self-evidently profound: the dissipation, if not
  outright negation, of the basic antagonism between living labour and
  capital.

  [...]

  On the Left, they tend to concern the very possibility of a
  non-capitalist life; insofar as this seems impossible, its disputes tend
  to retreat to liberal versions of drawing the marketżs boundaries.

  What is particularly revealing and significant here, certainly for the
  radical Left, is the intense ambivalence that the contention of
  capitalżs subsumption of life has produced within neo- and post-Marxist
  thought. On the one hand, there is the understandably pessimistic
  reaction, from the Frankfurt School to Baudrillard, that tends to see
  the intensification of capitalist subsumption as an incorporation of all
  social and natural life within the reproduction of capitalism, leading
  to the exhaustion of anti-capitalist politics, even its imagination.
  Notoriously, environmental catastrophe seems a far more realistic future
  for many than an end to capitalism. On the other hand, Negri and others
  have drawn a radically opposed conclusion: that capitalżs tendency to
  subsume life is merely a consequence of the intensification of capitalżs
  parasitic dependence on life; that capitalist production processes
  change not of their own accord, but as a result of the power and
  resistance of labour. This therefore demonstrates the very creativity
  and growing autonomy of living labour, which capital only subsumes as an
  increasingly thin membrane of control, predisposed to disintegrate. For
  the former, capital tends to subsume not only labour but life; for the
  latter, capitalżs tendency to subsume life is merely its tendency to
  reach its unsubsumable limit. Such opposed reactions to such similar
  structural characterisations of capital is striking. It indicates an
  intractable disagreement, since both reactions seem liable to each
  otherżs objections. But rather than approaching it as a simple choice or
  alternative, perhaps it indicates a change of the terms of struggle that
  needs to be grasped as such: no longer between living labour and
  capital, as Marx understood this, where capital is understood simply as
  dead or mechanical; but between alternative forms of life, capitalist
  life versus non-capitalist life. In other words, not a struggle between
  life and non-life, but between alternative forms of life. Negri remains
  an orthodox Marxist in maintaining a residual, unsubsumable, border
  between capital and life ż non-capitalist life remains for him a
  tautology. The Frankfurt Schoolżs thinking of non-capitalist life tended
  to remain utopian. Neither of them quite confront the predicament that
  anti-capitalism has become the struggle to wrest non-capitalist life
  from capitalist life.

  [...]

  The consequences for education are profound and in many respects very
  visible. Most obviously, the subsumption of life by capital offers a
  powerful explanation of why education, despite being formally outside
  the labour process, is nonetheless treated as integral to it, indeed, an
  urgent and necessary part of the capitalist mode of production. By the
  same token, it also suggests that the extension of education beyond the
  formal realms of schools, colleges, etc., should also be seen within
  this extended orbit of production. In sum, it provides grounds for
  understanding the subsumption of education by capital, and indicates how
  education itself becomes a mode, perhaps the central mode, of capitalżs
  subsumption of life. żLife long learningż is not exhausted by this
  explanation, but it can certainly be interpreted as a struggle between
  capitalist-life and non-capitalist life.
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