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there's two questions crunched into each other in the last post i put up:
1. the particular functions of pan's mode of interaction in this place when it comes to structural problems and debate about them and
2. an outline of the type of problem in the actually existing world (whatever that means, really) that moderate-ness as processed through (1) would functionally exclude.
then a little rant got started and took on a life of its own.
anyway: i guess my position would come down to: the dominant political parties in the states both operate within ideological boxes that are geared around avoidance of structural problems.
the shared assumptions: capitalism is in itself rational. the parties differ on the extent of that rationality and on what needs to be done compensate for its shortcomings--but both believe that capitalism is in itself rational.
because capitalism is in itself rational, then it follows that the united states, which is the belly of the beast, is in itself rational. problems that arise then are adjustment issues, not functions of problems with the underlying rationality itself. so problems that arise, and which cannot be avoided (avoidance being always plan a, it seems), therefore can be addressed by tacking on some extra element that will be charged with making the necessary adjustment.
but the assumption that the socio-economic order within the united states is necessarily rational because, somehow, it cannot be otherwise a priori is a shared assumption that cuts across party divisions.
obviously, when it comes to fashioning these extra adjustment mechanisms, reps and dems diverge: the right prefers a kind of voluntarism (discourse of the will--they LOVE it), the democrats a more socially-oriented response.
when it comes to educational policy, the right favors privatization, the democrats--well, what? they default into defending the existing system because, and ONLY because, when compared with the lunacy of the conservative educational philosophy, the status quo doesnt look so bad.
but think about it. the educational system is the primary mechanism of social reproduction--what it reproduces is the class system that is in place---but the american economic order has been fundamentally transformed since the late 1970s--and there is talk about adjustments, but no adjustments--time passes, the reorganization of the american socio-economic order accelerates, affecting sector after sector---and along with that the class profile being reproduced by the american educational system and the profile of the labor pool diverge more and more. think the disappearance of the american working class. think the much graver problems that result for the poor. the ideological order within which we operate would assign everyone either a place in the "middle class" or they disappear. the ideology under which we operate is geared around denial. it is a mechanism of denial.
addressing this process would require asking certain questions: does it make sense for the united states to simply allow its internal organization to be remolded by the reorganization of capitalism? does it make sense to assume that the logic of this remolding will simply be given by capitalism itself?
it appears that the right imagines this will happen, and in this the right is operating with an understanding of the relations between registers of a particular mode of production that is so crude that it would have made even stalin blush.
how exactly are markets rational?
is social reproduction a market function?
clearly it is not--it feeds into labor pools but is not itself a function of those pools--it does not move along with the structure of labor pools, there is nothing automatic about the relation. the relation requires a degree of planning.
the right's "plan" is to surrender: privatize everything, kids. that way, when the shit hits the fan politically as a result of a defunctionalized educational system that chooses social control over social opportunity, particularly when it comes to the poor, who in conservativeland are self-evidently expendable, there will be no political consequences to be bourne. that way, the populations whose futures are maimed can choke in silence. and that, apprently, is the american way, that is the way it should be.
the democrats default into defending the status quo. the argument that the status quo is preferable to crackpot notions like school vouchers is certainly persuasive in itself (to me anyway)--but the effect of this pseudo-debate is to marginalize critiques of the system itself--there is no space for such critiques.
but the problems that are being performed by the public education system in the states are structural. they speak to the inability of the dominant ideology to provide an adequate framework for thinking about the nature, meaning and responses to conditions that are unfolding beneath your feet, within your city, in real time, all around you.
it simply seems to me that the dominant ideology in the states is about avoiding all this. and we are talking here about ONE SECTOR. there are lots of sectors. there are lots of deep problems. this globalizing capitalism thing isnt working out as the neoliberals halluncinated that it would. and this is not a process that is only fucking around the southern hemisphere: it is generating and/or excerbating many real problems in the states as well.
and there is no debate. there is no discussion. there are no adjustments. there are no options. there IS avoidance. and this primarily because the spectrum of political positions that the americans confuse with a viable range of alternatives simply doesnt allow for this kind of issue to be addressed coherently.
so i dunno.
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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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