ABSTRACT
The latest accumulation crisis (the inability to increase profit margins enough) within the global capitalist system has been an important determinant of what has occurred since the late 1960s within political, social, cultural schooling/education, as well as many other sites, institutions and processes. Granted that causes and effects are very complex, but this does not mean that a series of determinants and consequences, when based on rigorous inquiries, are impossible to understand. The U.S. hegemon and its principal assistant, the U.K., provided the leadership in making the world economy open to unprecedented advantages for capital. The results have been dramatic: good for some, although a relatively small minority, and not so good and/or disastrous for the majority of the world’s people. Richard Sennett provides a succinct portrayal:
The breakdown [in 1973] of the Bretton Woods currency [Conference, 1944] agreements [which tied the American dollar to gold] … meant national constraints on investing weakened; in turn … corporations reconfigured themselves to meet a new international clientele of investors … more intent on short-term profits in share prices than on long-term profits in dividends. Jobs began similarly … to cross borders. So did consumption and communications. By the 1990s, thanks to micro processing advances in electronics, the dream/nightmare of automation became a reality in both manual and bureaucratic labor: at last it would be cheaper to invest in machines than to pay people to work. (Sennett 2006, 6-7)
Sennett’s claim may be made clearer when placed within the historical tradition of civil society literature. Civil society has been defined as a safety zone between citizens and a potential authoritarian government. Most Western writers have insisted that a healthy civil society must include a market economy as well as a liberal political system. Others have argued that capitalism and authentic democracy are incompatible, and that capitalism has become a total system. Adam Seligman focuses on one of the most important problems within civil society arguments, namely the disagreement between the liberal-individualist and socialist
views. This tension is based on the private and public realities of our social lives. The liberals have stressed liberty, whereas the socialists have championed equality. Were individual liberty to become dominant, in a totally laissez-faire market economy, social equality would become impossible. Conversely, if equality dominated, it would require the state’s regulation of the capitalist market-as well as its participants’ “freedoms” (Seligman 1992, 115-16). Seligman argues that we are still wrestling with the problem of reconciling the problem of abstract rights for the individual of liberal construction and the demands for concrete entitlements and “mutual welfare.” According to Seligman, the addition of socio-economic rights to civil and political ones represents an important extension, and even a universalization, of citizenship. Moreover, it served to oppose the extreme individualism of liberal 19th-century political theory and practice.
