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hiredgun: there is a jump in the op yes.
if you are thinking about the effects of state actions in the context of a rapidly and radically changing economic situation...how much of a guide to thinking is policy maker intent(s)?
intent seems only interesting to me if you are trying to explain the legislative origin of a policy or sequence of policies.
once implemented as elements of a bureaucratic system, policies become system parameters and their effects and meanings functions of the effects of these parameters on system activity.
here is a version of the system: globalizing capitalism is characterised by a bunch of processes--one of them is the increasing transnationalization of production: this process relies on supply chain/pool technologies and just-in-time type logistical parameters to co-ordinate networks of small-to medium-scale contractors located anywhere on the globe so long as the logistics/transport infrastructure (say) are such that they can function as part of the overall just-in-time system.
this production system has a history and that history can be seen as a kind of scatter field the origin of which is the explosion/fragmentation of the older factory. the time-line extends back to the early 1950s. the initial fragmentation involved numerical machine tools and the subcontracting of semi-skilled production. the same logic repeats at different levels of industrial production, beginning a slight different moments---so imagine it as a scatter field or as a diagram of an explosion.
the older factory system was of a piece with the organization of capitalism within the framework of the nation-state.
the system of social reproduction--everywhere really, but in a particularly badly done way in the states--was linked to the labor pool required for this type of production system.
the process of fragmentation of this older model of production--and the labor market/pool required for it--has been going on for 30 years.
the american educational system--the system of social reproduction--has not and seemingly cannot adapt to it.
why? the american model of spatialized class segregation, the relation of education to property tax rates, the absence of anything like a central co-ordinating mechanism for adjusting the characteristics of the social profile generated by the educational system and the actually existing labor market...
so in general the american educational system reproduces a labor market that no longer exists.
who is affected by this? disproportionately the poor and what would have been the working-class.
how is this problem being addressed? the volunteer military, the prison-industrial complex and a media ideology that focusses on the affluent as subject-position interpellated by news and other forms of adervtisement and which sees in the social consequences of this defunctionalization evidence of arbitrary violence, etc. what you see is a wholesale refusal to address social reality. a retreat into a bourgeois bubble supported by consumer debt and a televisual world that frames out structural problems
what else? in quick terms: a conservative educational politics that is the exact opposite of what is required, idiotic legislation like "nclb" that functions to collapse outmoded political argumentation (ideology) into the material world through the mechanism of standardized testing...what is its function? political control---either intentionally or not, nclb can be read as an attempt to short circuit political consequences of this dysfunctional space by collapsing ideology into the object world.
what does it amount to? a choice: rather than adapt to complex changing circumstances, the right is opting for political neutralization in the shorter run.
what sense does this make? well none if the longer-term well-being of the american socio-economic system is a priority. but it isnt, it seems.
same logic is applied to other registers of state policy.
the statement about the neo-feudal order is an optimistic scenario that indicates outcomes.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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