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Tuesday 8 November 2011
by: Henry A. Giroux, Campaign for the Public University
http://www.truth-out.org/beyond-limits-neoliberal-higher-education-global-youth-resistance-and-americanbritish-divide/1320688
“We need a wholesale revision of how a democracy both listens to and treats young people.”[1]
The global reach and destructiveness of neoliberal values and disciplinary controls are not only evident in the widespread hardships and human suffering caused by the economic recession of 2008, they are also visible in the ongoing and ruthless assault on the social state, workers, unions, higher education, students, and any vestige of the social at odds with neoliberal values. Under the regime of market fundamentalism, institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect the public from the excesses of the market have been either weakened or abolished, as are many of those public spheres where private troubles can be understood as social problems and addressed as such.[2] Privatization has run rampant, engulfing institutions as different in their goals and functions as public schools and core public services, on the one hand, and prisons, on the other. This shift from the social contract to savage forms of corporate sovereignty is part of a broader process of “reducing state support of social goods [and] means that states—the institutions best placed to defend the gains workers and other popular forces have made in previous struggles—are instead abandoning them.”[3] Faced with massive deficits, the U.S. federal government along with many states are refusing to raise taxes either on the rich or on wealthy corporations, while at the same time enacting massive cuts in everything from Medicaid programs, food banks, and worker retirement funds to higher education and health care programs for children. For example, Florida Governor Rick Scott has “proposed slashing corporate income and property taxes, laying off 6,700 state employees, cutting education funding by $4.8 billion, and cutting Medicaid by almost $4 billion. Scott’s ultimate plan is to phase the Sunshine state’s corporate income tax out entirely. He [wants] to gut Florida’s unemployment insurance system, leaving unemployed workers ‘with much less economic protection than unemployed workers in any other state in the country.’”[4] As social problems are privatized and public spaces are commodified, there has been an increased emphasis on individual solutions to socially produced problems, while at the same time market relations and the commanding institutions of capital are divorced from matters of politics, ethics, and responsibility. Free market ideology with its emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of social protections, and its deregulation of economic activity now shapes practically every commanding political and economic institution in the United States. In these circumstances, notions of the public good, community, and the obligations of citizenship are replaced by the overburdened demands of individual responsibility and an utterly privatized ideal of freedom.
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