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

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