Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and the Rise of Consumerist Education by Edberto M. Villegas

Liberalism, Neoliberalism and the Rise of Consumerist Education
Edberto M. Villegas

The rise of the bourgeois class into economic and political powers in the 17th to the 19th centuries in Europe correspondingly brought with it a theoretical justification of this social phenomenon, the dissemination by this class through their intellectuals of the theory of the natural rights of men. Though the theory of the universal rights of men first gained academic credence in the Peripatetic school of the Stoics of Ancient Greece, dominated by the Athenian middle class, it was revived in Northern Europe, particularly among the active merchant class in the Netherlands by two philosophers, Athusius and Grotius. The Ancient Stoic philosophy had still a religious basis as it expounded that all persons are the breaths of One God and therefore are equal and that there is a Divine Plan in the world. Stoic philosophy did not, however, reach the masses as it was confined as a culture of high learning among the intellectual elites of Greece and Rome, the most notable of which is seen in the writings of the stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD ). The theory of natural rights as it was resurrected by the intellectuals of the rising bourgeois class in the 17th century, after its long hiatus during the Middle or the Dark Ages when all forms of Greek thought were eschewed, later found expression in the theory of liberalism of Thomas Hobbes. While his predecessors still advocated a God as the basis of rights, Hobbes eliminated all religious justifications of these rights. To him they are founded on the basic instinct of self-preservation or what he calls the right to life of every person.

John Locke, who was closely associated with the English bourgeois class as a custom official, developed the right to life and happiness of Hobbes to include the right to property of the individual. The theory of liberalism when it appeared in Europe primarily emphasized the rights of the individual against the state, which was then controlled by the nobility and the clergy, who had as their favorite milking cows when their coffers ran out, the emerging wealthy bourgeois class in the form of new taxes, enforced monetary contribution and even outright confiscation of properties. Thus to the liberals the right of the individual became the right to do business unmolested by the state (Adam Smith and the French Physiocrats) and the right against unjust taxes, the rallying cry of the French bourgeoisie in the French revolution of 1789. This was also the case in the earlier American 1776 revolution in which the main spark of the rebellion against colonial master Britain was what the nascent American bourgeois class considered unjust taxes on imports which led to the Boston Tea Party.

After the successful revolutions of the bourgeois class against the feudal monarchies in Europe, using the masses as cannon fodders who were led to believe that they too will enjoy political and economic emancipation after these social upheavals, this class forthwith limited the right of suffrage to the propertied and educated. And all promised economic reforms were all but forgotten. The masses were made to believe that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the National Assembly in 1789 will bring about their liberation from the shackles of feudalism, under a new regime of liberty, equality and fraternity for all “citizens or people” as the French revolutionary bourgeois and petty- bourgeois intellectuals call them. But such trust in their bourgeois leaders proved to be misguided.
The betrayal of the libertarian promises to the lower classes pushed them to seek for an explanation of their unfortunate fate as some of their leaders were even hanged by the victorious bourgeois classes (the cases of the Levellers in the Cromwellian Army in the English revolution and Babeuf and other leaders of the League of the Just during the French revolution). For indeed the liberal philosophy of the bourgeoisie only reflected the morality of this class which became economically and politically dominant in Western Europe and the United States. Thus the virtue of individualism and the inviolability of private property were lauded in the constitutions of this class and none of the rights of man went beyond egoistical man, “an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice” (Marx 1964: 26). In short, the modes of life of the successful bourgeois became the rights of the citizen.

In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, which was written at the request of the banned League of the Just (which later became the Communist Party), Marx and Engels analyzed the historical roots of the betrayal of the masses, particularly the working classes, and explained the causes of their continued impoverishment and even more intense exploitation. Marx would later go into a more in-depth study of the exploitation of the working class and the rapacity of the now-dominant bourgeois capitalist class in controlling the resources of societies. Using the methods of political economy, class analysis and the labor theory of value, which were earlier developed by theoreticians who themselves defended the rights of the bourgeois class, Marx used these tools of analysis to expose the oppressive nature of capitalism itself. Forthwith, the writings of Marx and Engels instantly became popular among the masses, especially the working classes of Europe and America, later also inspiring and arousing to action the common peoples of all continents. Though Marx was hard to read, there emerged among the masses intellectuals who sided with the plight of the poor and endeavored to teach to them the basic principles of Marxism. Going into the 20th century, socialist revolutions riveted Europe, spreading into Asia and later into South America and Africa. The bourgeois class was shocked from its momentary complacency during the period of the glorious rise of capitalism from the point of view of its leaders in the second half of the 19th century and encouraged and supported intellectuals in the academe to formulate theoretical arguments to confront Marx’s scathing critiques of capitalism, which were threatening the very foundations of the comfortable existence of the bourgeois. (Hobsbawm 1979)

In the field of economic analysis, the German Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914) from his university pedestal, attempted to demolish the theory of Marx, but it is generally acknowledged today by economic theoreticians that Böhm-Bawerk committed the error of isolating volume I of Das Kapital from volume III. (Böhm-Bawerk 1954: 597; Negishi 1989: 77) What dismayed the bourgeois academics and their mentors, the big bourgeois class, was that the very discipline that was developed by their predecessors, political economy, was the very same weapon utilized by Marx to show how the capitalist system that sustains them was self-contradictory in its supposed role as the bringer of progress to humanity. Capitalism itself was instead, as Marx elucidated in Das Kapital, bringing the world order into a state of economic chaos and degradation of the humanity of individuals. Political economy with its assumption of the existence of classes in society afforded a tool for Marxists to emphasize the irreconcilable interests of the dominant and the subordinate classes. Thus, to avoid the onslaughts by the Marxists with their concept of the class struggle, the study of political economy was increasingly transformed by the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois intellectuals in the academe into a variant of mathematics. The first notable expression of this was the equilibrium analysis of economic variables - prices, supply, demand and interest - by the Englishman Alfred Marshall in his Principles of Economics (1891, 1920) where economic phenomena were analyzed abstracted from the existence of classes in societies. Later on, the term ceteris paribus would be utilized as a methodological premise in economic analysis, which is the assumption that all individuals are equal in their influence on the economy (“market” to the bourgeois economists). Thus, the concept of exploitation of the dominant class over the subservient class, which was even seen by the classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, was done away with one stroke of “keeping all else constant.” Inevitably, the word “political” was dropped from the study of the productive activities of humans, and only the term “economics” was retained in American universities starting in the 1930’s and the so-called mathematics of economics (econometrics) was developed, notably in Harvard. Economics was finally divorced from the social inequalities of classes and became a supposed science of scarcity (Samuelson) involving the interaction of land, labor and capital. When Simon Kuznets introduced his concepts of gross domestic product, gross national product and per- capita income - the latter an assumption that the wealth of a nation is equally distributed among its population ceteris paribus - capitalist-dominated/ influenced countries, starting with the US, adopted his methods to map the economic development of their societies. For these countries, the growth of Gross National Product (GNP) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) henceforth became the mantra for progress, including the Philippines, from the 1950’s to the present. Pleased with the non-political economic ideas of Kuznets, the bourgeois-influenced Nobel Priza panel in Stockholm awarded the Nobel prize in economics to this Harvard professor in 1971.

With the advent of capitalism, private corporations gradually made strong inroads into the universities of the US and Europe. They funded studies and researches of professors and scientists to advance their business interests by putting up educational foundations like the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fullbright Foundation, and more recently the Bill Gates Foundation. These activities of the bourgeoisie were two-pronged – they were able to save on taxes since educational foundations were tax- exempt and they could co-opt academic intellectuals who may have leanings to Marxist theory. In order to accomplish the latter objective, generous scholarships and study grants were extended to graduate and post-graduate students to develop and disseminate theories which counter the Marxist analysis of societies. Such theories were the equilibrium analysis, first popularized by Marshall in economics and applied by Pareto to sociology, the functionalist theory of Talcott Parsons, inspired by the anti-Marxist social studies of Max Weber, the theory of growth of Walt Rostow (Five Stages of Growth has the sub-title of A Non-Communist Manifesto [1960]) and of course the ideas of Kuznets.

Neoliberalism and Globalization

With the fall of the USSR in 1991, considered by capitalist nations, especially the US, as their arch-rival in controlling states and their resources, especially in the Third World, the bourgeois class has reconstructed the ideological meaning of liberalism, placing greater emphasis on its economic application. After the demise of the USSR, monopoly capitalism, through its influence on the academe wanted to make sure that its ensuing more intensified expansion and entrenchment in the global economic order will have secure theoretical trappings. Thus, the theory of the “global village” first popularized by Marshall McLuhan from the University of Toronto and the so-called globalization of market by the Harvard professor Theodore Levitt were developed by capitalist-dominated economic institutions, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), to justify the more aggressive drive of the Transnational Corporations (TNC) in the global order. While formerly, the theory of liberalism had a more dominant political connotation when the rising bourgeois classes in Europe used it as an ideological weapon against the feudal order to wrest power in national and local politics, the theory of “neoliberalism” in its advocacy of global free trade is more encompassing.

Neoliberalism as befitting its usefulness for the bourgeoisie has been given a development meaning in line with the economic growth of societies to the advantage of the capitalist nations. For instance, the theory in politics of Theda Skocpol and Peter Evans of Harvard of “strong and weak states” had been hyped-up by capitalist-funded institutions and spread in universities in order to orient states, particularly in the Third World, including the Philippines, to the economic programs of the TNCs to open wider their markets. (Macapagal-Arroyo’s strong republic was inspired by this theory.) Evans, for instance,
Korea and Japan, with their export-driven economies as examples of strong states. Evans calls these states “developmental states” with their “embedded autonomy” or their capacity of mixing two contradictory features which is a “Western bureaucratic insulation with intense immersion in the surrounding social structure.” (Evans 1989: 561-587) It is to be noted that the theory of strong and weak states, sometimes referred to as the “relative autonomy of the state” is just a revival of the idealist theory of the state of the liberal George Hegel of the 19th century. Hegel viewed the state as independent from civil society and thus could play an arbiter role in reconciling conflicting interests of different classes in society. Hegel takes the state as an abstract moral entity which must lead a society to the realization of the Absolute Reason. It thus could function as a savior of defective societies, if it only truly assumes its designated moral responsibility.

With the more aggressive excursus of private corporations in the 1990s into the educational system, curricula of schools have been gradually patterned to the globalization programs of the monopoly capitalists. More and more schools the world over have given greater emphasis to the needs of capitalist business, emphasizing vocational courses, recruiting grounds for rank and file workers in factories, in lower and middle schools and promoting research in universities for the profit goals of companies, e.g., research for high-breed plant varieties, which use fertilizers of capitalist firms, and simulation studies to prove that an export-led economy is best for national development. Universities, as in UP, have put up pools of scientists and professors, who can be hired at call by private corporations needing their expertise. This trend is epitomized in the so-called UP Intellectual Property Office of former UP President Emil Javier presented in his UP Plan 2008. Slowly, subjects, particularly in the social sciences, which capitalist creditors of indebted countries consider irrelevant to their interests and even potentially threatening, are to be phased out in the schools of these countries, even in state universities, like the UP. Such epithets as being “world-class” in education and being competitive are being given honorific meanings or hyped-up meaning that universities must give priorities to the natural sciences, important for the discoveries of new saleable products and considered socially neutral. Thus, more funding are extended to courses needed by the TNCs as in schools of engineering in Third World universities, which supply the personnel for global corporations, and so-called techno- parks are put up in campuses as is the case in UP where private firms can more immediately gobble up good graduates and sell their products to school authorities.

Ever since the first liberal apologists of the bourgeois class have become ascendant in universities in the US with their fervid emphasis on individualism, knowledge has been considered a commodity as is true with all products produced by capitalists. Terms like the universities as “marketplaces of ideas” and “students as consumers of knowledge,” inspired by the market mentality of the bourgeoisie have seeped into the academic vocabulary. With their new-found confidence after the fall of the USSR, US monopoly capitalism is now more than ever determined to commercialize education. In UP, this took the form of the Revised General Education Program (RGEP) introduced in 2002 where students are given the choice as “free” consumers of knowledge to select what subjects they want among a variety being offered in the university “market” to suit their personal interests. As a result, subjects which are vitally important for nation- and culture-building like history courses are dependent upon the economic calculations of the students. Since these students exist in a capitalist milieu where monetary advance is considered of primary importance, students consider if they will profit from such knowledge materially or not. In this market-driven culture, the purpose of education of instilling the values of social responsibility is defeated in the face of intense individualism promoted by liberalism and neoliberalism as they are expounded in theories in our schools today.

With the drive to dominate the global market by monopoly capitalism with its neoliberal rationalization of globalization, which is of course detrimental to weaker economies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB) and World Trade Organization (WTO) have popularized the call for liberalization, deregulation and privatization as beneficial for all societies. With the approval of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in December 1995, the TNCs have eyed the educational systems as a lucrative area for business. It is to be noted that the TNCs under GATS have already succeeded in opening wider the global financial and retail systems, causing the great financial crisis of Asia, Russia and Latin America from 1997 to 2001 which have wrought havoc to the lives of millions of peoples in these areas.

The TNCs, led by US monopoly capitalism, has lobbied in conferences on GATS in Geneva for the elimination of government subsidies for education under the program of privatization and deregulation being pushed by globalization. They have formed a so-called Global Alliance for Transnational Education (GATE) headed by a certain Gleen R. Jones, CEO of the virtual university Jones International Inc. This Alliance with the support of the World Bank aims to make the service of education market-based as it has identified the $2 trillion cost for education or 1/20th of the world GDP as a very promising new investment area. The World Bank had been very cooperative in this project, pressuring governments, including those in Europe, either to privatize state schools or to increase tuition fees, gradually freeing governments from educational subsidies. Moves to eliminate state support for education in France and Germany have, however, been met with massive student and faculty demonstrations, with French students forcing the closure of Sorbonne University for two months in early 2003 in their show of force against the commercialization of education. The Chirac government as a result of these student protests rescinded its decision to abolish free tertiary education.

The GATE, with the assistance of the WB’s own Alliance for Global Learning, has sponsored so-called Information Technology (IT) rooms in schools and universities under their program of e-learning, primarily aimed to sell their computer products. It has undertaken training for teachers and is working closely with governments and private firms to conduct intervention programs in educational institutions. Other business sponsors of such programs are the corporate bank JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, the consultancy firm Ernst & Young and TNCs in IT, such as Sun Microsystems and 3 Com. The Bill Gates Foundation has also been funding the putting up of techno parks in English universities to sell Microsoft products. As Glenn R. Jones enthuses, “Education is one of the fastest- growing of all markets. Private training and the adult education industry are expected to achieve double-digit growth throughout the next decade.”

The intrusion of private business into the educational system of welfare-state societies in Europe has alarmed student and faculty organizations in this continent. This is expressed by Per Nyborg, Chairman for the Committee for Higher Education and Research, Council of Europe:

The emergence of other providers of higher education than the domestic universities has caused concern in many countries. Especially in developing countries and in countries in transition, governments have felt the need to increase their control over these new providers. National standards, curricula and degree-awarding powers must be protected to safeguard the inclusion of higher education in national objectives for economic development for protection of the culture and for the further development of a democratic society. Little is known about the consequences of GATS for quality, access and equity of higher education. There is in the university sector a fear that GATS may influence the national authority to regulate higher education systems, and have unforeseen consequences on public subsidies for higher education. Both the European University Association (EUA) and the National Unions of Students in Europe (ESIB) have taken a critical stand on trade in educational services.

The Rise of Consumerist Education

Neoliberalism as purveyed in universities serves as a reliable base for the growing commercialization of education. It has created a new generation of highly-individualistic students, imbibing in them the belief that the knowledge that they acquired in schools was due to their capacity to pay and no thanks to society. They graduate from schools with the consumerist mentality of getting back from society what they have invested in their education. The consumer is self-centered with the aim of maximizing his/ her pleasures in the market or calculating what he/she will benefit for himself/herself in the future for any present spending.

Under the aegis of liberalism and neoliberalism, educational institutions, including state schools, are being made to eschew value-directed education. Especially in the United States, with the rise of pragmatism and behaviorism in the 20th century, which are offsprings of liberalism, it has been contended by many academicians that a discipline can only be respectable if it is value-free. Within this knowledge milieu, universities have shirked from the inculcation of social responsibility among its students, consequently breeding mostly go-getters and socially-indifferent humans. This situation has been aggravated by the phasing-out of social science and art subjects in favor of technical and business courses favorable to the interests of private corporations, in the era of globalization of monopoly capitalism. Education to form the well-rounded person, the generalist- oriented individual, has been considered less important compared to the molding of technical and scientific specializations. The techno-freak has been a product of this emphasis on specialization in contrast with education in the past ages of humanity when the development of the socially-aware and compassionate person was highly valued, the Renaissance man in European classical education and the great man in Confucian education. Specialization in knowledge has been a natural consequence of specialization in the production of a good as argued for by the founding fathers of capitalist thought, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Smith strongly advocated specialization and division of labor to improve the quality of a product and efficiency on the factory floor, while Ricardo vies for specialization in the manufacture of a trade good by a country in his theory of comparative advantage. In the age of neoliberal trade, developing nations are made to specialize in the making of manufactured parts of machines needed by the leading TNCs, whose mother companies are based in the developed countries. This assembly type of business is being promoted by capitalist institutions like the World Bank and the IMF as an export-oriented industrialization for developing nations. Well-paid economists and other intellectuals in these institutions and the academe have presented this set-up as a so-called international division of labor, which of course reduces the production cost of TNCs since labor in developing nations is cheap,.
With the rise of capitalism, knowledge has become a commodity sold and bought in the market of the capitalists. Computer, business, engineering and nursing schools have cropped up like mushrooms in the forest to service the assembly lines, offices, call centers, department stores and hospitals of the big bourgeoisie. Students anxiously look forward to the interview with the personnel managers of the big firms, and their drive for good grades are directed to impress these recruiters of capitalism who are in the lookout to buy at the cheapest price possible summa and magna graduates.

Under consumerist education, schools are becoming like huge factories to mass produce students for the TNCs. But this mass production of graduates has only created an excess of skilled individuals who increase the number of unemployed in a society. But this is to the great advantage of the private companies who can offer lower salaries and wages to the numerous applicants competing for scarce jobs in the labor market as the very advance of technology in capitalist undertakings constantly render labor redundant. The emergence of the reserve army of labor under capitalism, particularly in the age of globalization, where according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) around 2 billion people are unemployed or under-employed, has resulted in a tremendous wastage of knowledge acquired by peoples in their long education and who are unable to find work.
With the trend of privatization of state schools, initiated by neoliberalism, education may inevitably become just an adjunct of corporate business. Since business primarily regards the utilization of things and values as means for the advancement of profit, this trend of education will expectedly turn out mere specialists of knowledge and techie freaks, whose social and cultural sensitivity may be sorely lacking. Since culture and art to the capitalists are only useful for as long as they could lead to more profits (note the attempt to appeal to Filipino culture by McDonald’s advertisements), graduates from capitalist-influenced educational institutions will most likely just add to the coterie of humans who may not be able to grasp the value of selfless sacrifice for the welfare of society. Such a phenomenon is slowly being witnessed in the epitome of capitalist societies, the United States, with the rise of individual crimes such as corporate malfeasance, inheritance and thrill killings and the growing number of callous retrenchments of workers to save on costs by competing firms. The rule of capitalism, with the consumerist kind of education it engenders, can only lead to material greed and social decadence, not to speak of the economic crises of overproduction that it gives rise to. The deterioration of post-industrialized capitalist society is slowly unfolding before our eyes, with the greater and greater concentration of the wealth of the world in the hands of the few, while the have-nots continue to swell in all continents. Never in the history of the world have we seen such extensive hunger of its populace - according to the United Nations numbering nearly one billion people - this while the resources to support humanity continue to increase tenfold. Such an appalling contradiction can only happen in a materialistic culture that champions private ownership at the expense of the collective good. Engineers, workers, and scientists continue to churn out and invent technological goods that can improve the lot of humanity. These, however, are owned and are under the disposal of the parasitical bourgeois class.

Conclusion

Unless the commercialization set by neoliberalism in schools with its theoretical incantations of free trade, competition, the level playing field, and consumer preference, is ended, the goal of education for the emancipation of humanity from want and social ignorance will indeed become more remote. Neoliberalism as it is peddled in universities today has taken by-ways and side-ways to snare in its grasp intellectuals who are prone to follow new fashions of knowledge set by the capitalist societies in the West. Liberalism and its variant neoliberalism have been the inspirations behind such theories like post-modernism and that of the weak and strong states which have attracted intellectuals in institutions of higher learning the world over. But as we have seen, liberalism and neoliberalism are the ideological paraphernalia of the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class, the dominant economic class at present. The clever ideologues of this class have coated these theories as if they will promote the freedoms of all individuals. However, the freedoms promised by these idealist ideologies, are only abstract freedoms as the bourgeoisie will never aim to liberate all classes from want through a social distribution of the resources of societies, since this might displace their control on the social means of production. Thus, the kind of education that the bourgeoisie encourages is one of endless theoretical debates on issues, and the governments they control discourage, even persecute, those who would advocate a radical change in the private ownership of the production and distribution of social goods and services. For indeed, the selfish bourgeois is becoming more and more aggressive in the struggle to perpetuate its intellectual hegemony in schools today in its preaching of neoliberalism and the globalization of markets. Socially-aware intellectuals and leaders must not allow this battle go the way of these enemies of the collective will to advance the economic and social liberation of humanity.

References

Böhm-Bawerk, E.V., R. Hilferding et al. 1975. Karl Marx and the close of his system. London: Merlin.
Evans, Peter. 1989. “ Predatory, Developmental and other Apparatuses: A Comparative Political Economy Perspective on the Third World State.” Sociological Forum 4(4):561-587.
Hobsbawm, E. J. 1964. The Age of Capital, 1848-1875. New York: New American Library.
Marx, Karl. 1964. “Bruno Bauer, On the Jewish Question.” In: T. B. Bottomore (ed.), Karl Marx’s Early Writings. New York: McGraw- Hill Paperbacks.
Negishi, Takashi. 1989. Economic theories in a non-Walrasian tradition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press.
Rostow, Walt. 1960. Five Stages of Growth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press.
Schumpeter, Joseph. 1954. History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

More on Marx by Arnold P. Alamon

MORE ON MARX
18 February 2006

It has been awhile since my last entry and we have covered quite a lot of ground since then. There are reasons for this delay of course. While the remote control and internet are equally guilty in keeping me from writing this blog or going out of my room (remember, they use to refer to my demographic as belonging to the slacker generation, the disenchanted not-so-young incapable of mustering enthusiasm for anything), I would have to confess that I have been hesitating in writing this entry. It is a daunting task writing about marxism.

For one, marxism is very much a contested body of thought. There are many groups who refer to themselves as marxists and each one of them is quick to contradict the other. Based on their divergent philosophical interpretations of marx’s ideas and their take on the social condition in question, they assume different political positions. However, they are unified by the basic marxist unity that things must change. The continuing critical debate among marxists which is a testament to the perspective’s relevance in the supposed postsocialist era we inhabit. These impassioned debates are not just informed by intellectual rigor (yes, marxists are a foolhardy lot). But what informs their passion, more often than not, is their deep commitment against social injustice. The best examples of humanity I have encountered within and outside the university were displayed by marxists. Their genuinie compassion and sacrifice for others are a continuing inspiration to others like us who have higher standards for being human. Thus, marxism does not just seduce our intellect but it also worms its way inside our hearts.

It is these twin traits that make marxism so appealling and also so difficult to explain. Should one talk about the brave and refreshing certainties that marxism so (arrogantly?) defends amidst the cynical and fence-sitting character of contemporary thought? Or should one highlight the unrelenting humanism that underlies all marxist revolutionary movements? On the one hand, marxism and the many intellectual bastards it has spawned stand as the singular philosophical system that offers a comprehensive understanding of almost everything from religion to sex, from politics to popular culture. Beyond offering such a sweeping understanding of the dynamics of the world, it also provides us with a map to change it. This trait of marxism has been the object of many criticisms from those who have problems with the arrogant certainties which characterizes marxist thought. That is why it becomes important to clarify and in the process resolve the dilemma posed above, that such necessary certainties should be understood in the light of marxism’s other trait .

Marxism is also a political movement borne out of people’s suffering. It is not just an intellectual movement which can be understood according to the quaint standards of philosophers and those who seemingly have a natural abhorrence for the truth. It is also a political movement of the rejected, downtrodden, and the plain dissatisfied. Peasants, workers, the urban poor have rallied around Marx’s basic ideas on the basis of a shared hope that things will change. It is not because Marx’s musings are essentially true and will remain so forever but its because the world continues to exclude many people from the fruits of their labor, the land that they till, the realization of their true potential. Marx does not regard the proletariat as beggars awaiting the charity of their masters. In the final analysis, he rejects the call for higher wages since according to him, they remain a slave’s wages nonetheless. Remember that for Marx the objective is to free the worker’s labor from capital so that he can work in a condition of freedom. And it takes a revolution to achieve this. This is the heart that informs the intellectual passion and political commitment of those who continue to dream of a better world.

Marxism is not just an allegiance to a rational and believable system of ideas but more so, it is also a hopeful stance despite the odds – a movement of the head and heart. It is not just about philosophical certainties but it also about a persistent hope that there is something better than this. There should be something more than (as quoted from the Indigo Girls) “cold beer and remote control.”

Which brings me to a moment of clarity. I have been numbed by serious multitasking for the past weeks – doing academic work, downloading, eating, drinking and beating deadlines (while always putting off writing this essay) all done within the confines of a room with Kanye West blaring in the background. I remember Marx’s famous quote while writing this and understand the conflicted nature of my existence. To paraphrase Marx, ideas “which reason has riveted to our conscience”, are like chains that we cannot free ourselves from without breaking our hearts. I should be going out (to the streets! to the mountains!) more often.

Classical Theories of Social Change

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A Momentary Pause by Arnold. P. Alamon

A Momentary Pause 

by Arnold P. Alamon 

He hoisted himself up the railing to dive face down three floors below according to eye witnesses. 

The news that someone took his own life always generates a collective gasp of shock among members of a community. The feeling of scandal is then followed by reverie as to the hows and whys of the case. Unlike other issues when it is easier to detach ourselves, suicide affects all of us on a personal level. It has that emotional resonance that give it a jarring effect. We wonder what strong forces in an individual's life could lead a person to do what seems to be an unthinkable act. Especially since we are all operating in society religiously following the instinct for self-preservation. 

Isn't it the case that there is a tacit agreement among us all that we are here to survive for ourselves and our families and we pattern our everyday life towards the attainment of this goal? The traffic, commerce, and the general hustle and bustle of everyday living follow this logic of survival. Thus, we are brought to a sudden pause when somebody decides not to participate in this game called life - abruptly, willfully, and dramatically. And in an upscale brand new mall at that.

It is curious that there are rising incidents of suicide within malls in recent times. It seems that the venue of choice for those who have lost hope dramatize their final act in these spaces that represent the good life in our society driven by consumption. The malls have become the new churches where we commune with our middle class aspirations. And the symbolic message of a painful self-inflicted death in these spaces is laden with so many meanings. 

At the core of these many possible interpretations is that behind the veneer of happiness and contentment that the display of abundance malls offer is actually the close affinity of this contemporary space with death. 

How many workers again died in the Bangladeshi sweatshop building collapse so that name brands can retail their hand-sewn designer clothes in malls and turn in superprofits? 1,129. How many overworked Chinese workers have also leaped to their deaths in a span of 72 hours so that you can have in time your latest Apple gadget that are now gloriously displayed in these malls for your touch and perusal? 14. How many construction workers died in this specific mall so that it can be opened in schedule feng shui style? The exact number is not known but there are reports of five to six individuals. 

But the macabre aspect of malls goes beyond these physical gruesome deaths. There is also the demise of life and spirit that these spaces violently symbolize. Outside the lighted glass-encased products are people whose labor value are less than the exchange value of the products they sell. For them, malling is a spectator sport where those who have the income purchase while they, in contractual below-minimum wages only look in envy. 

Malls are where all these contradictions in the way we order our society take place. It is thus understandable why it has become a venue of choice for those who are frustrated over their lot in life. In this singular space, the dream middle class life is so close yet so out of reach. To break through the exclusionary glass divide that the malls manifest within their spaces, it would take land holdings, fat government contracts or positions, or a family member working abroad, or in other words, successful entry into the high-spending consumer class.

The next day, the gleeming marble ties showed no trace of where the self-inflicted violence was staged. In their attempt to make sense of the event, some callously atrribute the suicide to the recent NBA game finals while others cite the supernatural forces that are supposedly inhabiting the place. 

For life must go on - a kind of life where the illusion of bounty and normalcy takes precedence over the  painful reality of frustration, exclusion, and want.

Bisdak and Home by Arnold P. Alamon

"BISAYANG dako," that's what we call ourselves in reference to our Visayan origins.

This is an ethnic identity that spans inhabitants of both Visayas and Mindanao island groups but not in the formal sense of how ethnic identities are determined.

We are more accurately classified as Cebuanos, Dabawenos, and Kagay-anons just to name a few of the sub-groups that make up the Bisdak identity.

Bisdak is more of an ethnic identification that arises in the context of other groups. Say, someone from Cebu and Davao find themselves in line at the MRT in Manila, and in the jostle for space during rush hour, one of them mutters, "pisti!" then an automatic solidarity is formed between the two.

It's like a trump card or a membership of an exclusive club composed of half the country's population versus the other half from the rest of non-Bisaya Philippines.

What is unique and heartwarming is the fluidity of relations instantaneously established when Bisdaks meet.

Everytime I ride a cab in Manila, I always engage the driver in small talk. Apart from mining from the cabbie about the sharpest political insight (many of which have made their way to this space), I always listen for the familiar Bisdak intonation.

Eight times out of 10, it is always a "Bai" (the bisdak version of pare) who happens to be at the wheel. If such Bisdak identities are established between the passenger and the driver then one is spared the obligatory tip, and the passenger can worry less about getting held up.

In universities in Manila, isn't it the case that the Bisdaks rule the many dormitories by their sheer number? I know of Tagalog friends who envy and are actually annoyed by this auto-solidarity - how we could understand them and speak their language and yet huddle among ourselves, speak our own dialect, and laugh devilishly, and then proceed to converse with them using their mother tongue. I am sure this is also true for Filipinos and Bisdaks working abroad.

Yet, one wonders if this lightness of friendship and easy solidarity of the Bisdak take place in all contexts. It seems to me that the Bisdak identification emerges in specific circumstances only. For instance, when the dominant culture is foreign i.e. Tagalog, or American, like a talisman or "Ironman," the Bisdak identification is called upon.

But among ourselves, do we have this automatic solidarity for each other "at home"? I am afraid not. Just look at the mayhem of our streets.

Crazy as it is, there is still some rules of courtesy that define Manila traffic behavior.

Eye contact is important among drivers in the northern metropolis. In that split second of seeing eye to eye, drivers communicate their intention through a method still yet to be deciphered by anthropologists. It could be that one acquires the right of way because you looked at the other driver first which would mean that you have first dibs at the intersection.

Here in Cagayan de Oro and other southern cities, eye contact is a no-no.

In fact what I observe is the absolute avoidance of eye contact and instead, the intention of the driver is conveyed through the bumper of his vehicle. At first, this frustrated me so much to the point that I have thought of installing a PA system just to vent and air out the expletives echoing inside the cabin of my truck. But I have learned the bumper trick since then to the discomfort of the occasional Manila-based passenger.

This kind of "iya-iya" behavior can be observed not just in the streets but also in almost all public spaces. In the supermarket line, when paying your bills, the bumper rule applies. Only when people line up to take their bland Sunday wafer is there a semblance of order.

One wonders why this is so. We can be Bisdak before others and yet not be Bisdak with ourselves here in our "home".

Maybe because the concept of "home" is problematic among us Bisdaks.

We are a people without roots because life is hard in the places we came from. That is why many of us leave or plan to leave for places more abundant and orderly. While we call CDO our home, we know we will be ready to leave it at a moment's notice once better opportunities come by. The solidarity Bisdaks is achieved when they meet each other in faraway places and is bounded by these common migratory aspirations.

In the meantime, for those of us left behind, our southern streets reflect this desperate dance of our shared fates as residents of migrant cities slowly transforming into urban squalor. These are places whose bounties are seemingly reserved only for the lucky few.

Maybe this is why drivers look away in the intersections of our streets in a migrant city like CDO. We might see in each other's eyes the truth and the horror about how we all are just going round and round without a destination.

And home always is far away and a dream.

Twits by Arnold P. Alamon

IN THE age of the 140 character tweet, to make readers consider a series of ideas that are conveyed beyond the number of words in this sentence is every writer's challenge.

For sure there is potential for discipline and art in the haiku-like format of the tweet. But the bite-size approach to the delivery of content makes all the more clearer Marshall McLuhan's observation about contemporary practices of communication and how this reflects once again certain features of our shared social lives.

The fast and short medium of the tweet is the message.

There are other variations of this fast food approach to how we send and "consume" information in this day and age. The Facebook status message has become the ubiquitous banner headline of our personal lives where our idealized lifestyles are broadcasted for the inhabitants of our social universe's consumption or regurgitation.

All of a sudden our misadventures towards the path of alienating consumerism in the form of posted foodie and selfie pictures are breaking news on the social media platform. To the uninitiated these refer to mouth-watering pictures of expensive food and the contorted semi-naked approximations of hotness that we like the world to see as our presentation of digital selves.

Thus, we can make of two tendencies about how information is relayed and received nowadays, no doubt facilitated by internet connectivity as a productive force. It should be immediate and narcissistic just like fastfood.

Much has been said about the World Wide Web and the shrinking global village but two decades after Hillary Clinton, the promise of the net as a democratizing platform remains as such, a dead-end promise. For what has the net become in the year 2013 but an online version of a fast food burger joint or a high school cafeteria where the jocks, nerds, and [insert demographic here] occupy their own tables and create their own self-referential din of noise independent from each other. No thanks to Zuckerberg.

That is why I believe spaces like this, the opinion page of a newspaper and by extension newspaper production in the age of the digital, remain important bastions of a type of communication that follow a different tact. Instead of fast and furious tweets, we, column writers and newspaper staff offer contemplation and or discourse.

Narcissism, take a backseat to a passionate desire to connect and explain with the end goal of creating a more inclusive and progressive community (save for the few welcome occasions when column writers fall in love or wax poetic).

Implicit in the very format of the opinion page and the newspaper are the wagers that are set in exchange for the privilege of being printed - the names of column writers, reporters, and ultimately the Editor in Chief to whom aggrieved parties can send threats to.

It is a totally different ballgame on print I realized. And I agree with fellow columnist Giano Libot on his May 9, 2013 column that despite the much vaunted death of the medium, the format still has relevance. Newspaper production is still important precisely because it challenges the consume-and-discard idiom that rule new media these days.

Furthermore, the key difference between print and new media is the in-roads of institutionalized practices of accountability and the strong regard for the public good that characterizes the former. After all, the important matters involving our polity are not resolved instantaneously with the click of the like button or a mood meter.

So if you reached this last paragraph dear reader, this means that there is yet hope for a form of media that is deliberate and inclusive, one that contributes to disciplined and productive social discourse.

It somehow proves that we can still talk and listen to each other beyond 140 characters, instead of merely mumbling in our corner of the net, in bite-size portions jejemon style, like many of the twits do on the net.

from: http://www.sunstar.com.ph/cagayan-de-oro/opinion/2013/06/11/alamon-twits-286852

Mdme. Genita and Home by Arnold P. Alamon

TRAVEL brings us a better understanding of home. This was my thought as this small frail lady sat beside me on a six-hour bus ride from Butuan City to Cagayan de Oro, the sunset creating a golden halo on her silhouette.

I can see that time has beautifully weathered her face. Must be the different seasons that she had endured in the many places fate has brought her - first in the green and wet rice fields of Agusan del Norte as a young girl, then as a factory worker in Manila, and later on as a nanny to the royal family of a Middle Eastern country in the throes of revolution during the late 70s.

For the past week or so, I have been criss-crossing Mindanao for work. The anonymous hotel rooms, dusty and craggy roads, and the fatigue of work were settling in the spaces between my bones and I needed inspiration to carry me through the arduous bus ride. I didn't expect that an empty bus seat can be the balm to a tired soul.

This is the story of Madame Genita of Butuan City told to me as the bus we rode on hurtled through the coastal towns of Agusan del Sur and then Misamis Oriental. The middle daughter in a brood of 14 siblings, she decided to risk finding employment in Manila after realizing that her parents who tilled a small plot of rice land could barely feed their big family much less send her to school.

The ambition to help her family came when she gazed up one afternoon and saw an airplane rise up to the heavens from Bancasi airport taking on its wings her own dreams for a better life for her family.

Barely in her twenties, she asked permission of her departure from her father whom she dearly loved. In tears, her father who was already in his late years told her with certainty that if she leaves they never will see each other again. But the future and faraway places beckoned her.

And so she found herself as a factory worker in a textile firm in Manila. She found it fortuitous that a government to government program for overseas work was offered and she placed 34th among 700 applicants despite her broken English and just a few units of college.

It must be her unassuming yet determined demeanor that set her apart. The qualities that she saw in her father as he tilled their hard land through heat and rain, she mirrored in front of the employment agency and later on her bosses abroad. So she flew to this Middle Eastern land to serve as a nanny to the scion of a royal family.

That employment brought her to Paris as the family fled by private plane the Islamic revolution of the late 70s. After which she worked for another member of the wealthy family as a nurse to a recuperating patriarch in London.

In these jobs, she endeared herself to her bosses as the small yet reliable Filipino lady who could be trusted with providing care for their small children and family members. Not for long, she was considered a member of the family and brought to vacations all over the world every three months.

One of the memorable perks of her employment was having been serenaded by her idol Andy Williams at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. Her employer gifted her with VIP passes since he was part owner of the casino hotel.

She could have continued her employment with the wealthy family and enjoyed the comfort and stature that her bosses generously showered upon her but her independent spirit pushed her to seek her fate on her own terms.

The next few years saw her working in Hawaii first as a crew member and then manager of McDonalds. It was here that she experienced brief jail time as an undocumented worker. She defended herself before US immigration officials by arguing that her father fought for the US as a war veteran and she deserved to stay and work in the country. The spunk and courage of the diminutive woman must have impressed her interrogators and she was released.

It took 15 years before she was able to come home to her family in Butuan City. By this time, her beloved father was long buried. But home remained the same. Despite her regular remittances, her siblings, nephews and nieces were still struggling. This time around she was married and now had a daughter to raise whom she had to leave at the care of her mother because she had to leave for work once more for her own family and siblings.

She found herself working for a fish cannery in Alaska for the next few years. Their factory was open and unheated to preserve the valuable Alaskan king crabs they were packing and they worked with gloves and hard hats.

It was only a few years ago that Madame Genita decided to come home to Butuan City and build a home over the land that her father tilled. She was side-lined by a major injury while stocking in a Walmart store and she had to endure surgery on her arm and shoulder.

Back home, she needed to recuperate at the same time face once again the same problems that caused her to leave. She is worried over her daughter and her family who also needed to follow her footsteps working abroad in Hong Kong while her grandchildren remained under the care of her estranged son-in-law.

I asked her as we passed the rickety and dusty shacks of fisherfolks along the coastline, why did you still come home when all the heartbreak and frustration in your life emanate from this place, your country? She smiled and said sweetly, there is still no place like home.

In that seat on the bus toward home with Mdme. Genita beside me, I gained a new understanding about this place we call Mindanao.

One of the enduring stories of our people is the determination and sacrifices of the courageous who seek their fortunes elsewhere for their families. I just pray that when they come home, the land that caused them to leave will give them reason, this time around, to finally stay.

Welcome home, Madame Genita.

from: http://www.sunstar.com.ph/cagayan-de-oro/opinion/2013/05/31/alamon-mdme-genita-and-home-285020

The Sociological Imagination by C Wright Mills

 The Sociological Imagination

Chapter One: The Promise

C. Wright Mills (1959)

Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new heart or goes broke. 

When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

Yet people do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them.

Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many people been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of change? That Americans have not known such catastrophic changes as have the men and women of other societies is due to historical facts that are now quickly becoming 'merely history.' The history that now affects every individual is world history. Within this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of humankind is transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful. Political colonies are freed; new and less visible forms of imperialism installed. Revolutions occur; people feel the intimate grip of new kinds of authority. Totalitarian societies rise, and are smashed to bits - or succeed fabulously. After two centuries of ascendancy, capitalism is shown up as only one way to make society into an industrial apparatus. 

After two centuries of hope, even formal democracy is restricted to a quite small portion of mankind. Everywhere in the underdeveloped world, ancient ways of life are broken up and vague expectations become urgent demands. Everywhere in the overdeveloped world, the means of authority and of violence become total in scope and bureaucratic in form. Humanity itself now lies before us, the super-nation at either pole concentrating its most coordinated and massive efforts upon the preparation of World War Three.

The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of people to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, people often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary people feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That - in defense of selfhood - they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private individuals? Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap?

It is not only information that they need - in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need - although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy.

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination.

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues.

The first fruit of this imagination - and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it - is the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by locating herself within her period, that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of humans capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of 'human nature' are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of this living, he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst. It is characteristic of Herbert Spencer - turgid, polysyllabic, comprehensive; of E. A. Ross - graceful, muckraking, upright; of Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim; of the intricate and subtle Karl Mannheim. It is the quality of all that is intellectually excellent in Karl Marx; it is the clue to Thorstein Veblen's brilliant and ironic insight, to Joseph Schumpeter's many-sided constructions of reality; it is the basis of the psychological sweep of W. E. H. Lecky no less than of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber. And it is the signal of what is best in contemporary studies of people and society.

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked three sorts of questions:

(1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components, and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order? Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?

(2) Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole? How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves? And this period - what are its essential features? How does it differ from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of history-making?

(3) What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of `human nature' are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for 'human nature' of each and every feature of the society we are examining?

Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a family, a prison, a creed - these are the kinds of questions the best social analysts have asked. They are the intellectual pivots of classic studies of individuals in society - and they are the questions inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another - from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self - and to see the relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which she has her quality and her being.

That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men and women now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. In large part, contemporary humanity's self-conscious view of itself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative power of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By its use people whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar. Correctly or incorrectly, they often come to feel that they can now provide themselves with adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations. Older decisions that once appeared sound now seem to them products of a mind unaccountably dense. Their capacity for astonishment is made lively again. They acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a transvaluation of values: in a word, by their reflection and by their sensibility, they realize the cultural meaning of the social sciences.

Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between 'the personal troubles of milieu' and 'the public issues of social structure.' This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science.

Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his or her immediate relations with others; they have to do with one's self and with those limited areas of social life of which one is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within the scope of one's immediate milieu - the social setting that is directly open to her personal experience and to some extent her willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished by an individual are felt by her to be threatened.

Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of her inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieu into the institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened. Often there is a debate about what that value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it cannot very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary people. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often too it involves what Marxists call 'contradictions' or 'antagonisms.'

In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the individual, his skills and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million people are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.

Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to die in it with honor; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the higher safety of the military apparatus; or how to contribute to the war's termination. In short, according to one's values, to find a set of milieux and within it to survive the war or make one's death in it meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes; with what types of people it throws up into command; with its effects upon economic and political, family and religious institutions, with the unorganized irresponsibility of a world of nation-states.

Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the family and other institutions that bear upon them.

Or consider the metropolis - the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificent sprawl of the great city. For many members of the upperclass the personal solution to 'the problem of the city' is to have an apartment with private garage under it in the heart of the city and forty miles out, a house by Henry Hill, garden by Garrett Eckbo, on a hundred acres of private land. In these two controlled environments - with a small staff at each end and a private helicopter connection - most people could solve many of the problems of personal milieux caused by the facts of the city. But all this, however splendid, does not solve the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses. What should be done with this wonderful monstrosity? Break it all up into scattered units, combining residence and work? Refurbish it as it stands? Or, after evacuation, dynamite it and build new cities according to new plans in new places? What should those plans be? And who is to decide and to accomplish whatever choice is made? These are structural issues; to confront them and to solve them requires us to consider political and economic issues that affect innumerable milieux.

In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemployment becomes incapable of personal solution. In so far as war is inherent in the nation-state system and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in her restricted milieu will be powerless - with or without psychiatric aid - to solve the troubles this system or lack of system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped megalopolis and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped society, the issues of urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth.

What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination.