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Details: Written by: Kamran Mofid; Published: 29 August 2019; Hits: 3317

David Koch, US businessman, free marketeer, rightwing activist and a neoliberal fundamentalist par excellence, who passed away on 23 August 2019, is said to have bequeathed the world the legacy of ‘Death and Destruction.’*

‘As David Koch’s family mourns his loss, we are taking a moment to pause and grieve, too. We grieve for the families who lost loved ones due to limited health care access. We grieve for the Black communities living alongside waterways polluted by Koch’s chemical plants. We grieve for the Indigenous nations whose lands were used to build Koch’s industrial wealth. We grieve the destruction of democratic values through Koch’s investments in higher education…’-David Koch Is Dead. We Must Now Take On His Harmful Legacy in Higher Education.

David Kotch, The architect of ‘Death and Destruction’

Photo: Dark Money review: Nazi oil, the Koch brothers and a rightwing revolution

‘How does one eulogize a villain? It’s a question I find myself asking today after reading the news that David H Koch has died. What else can we really call a man who spent his entire adult life enriching himself at the expense of the world around him, leaving in his wake millions of destroyed lives, a planet on the brink of ecological catastrophe, and a nuclear superpower governed by a far-right political party?

While it is generally impolitic to castigate someone after death, in the case of David Koch, it’s hard not to point out that his life’s work was the destruction of others.

Koch went by many titles — billionaire industrialist, businessman, philanthropist, entrepreneur, conservative activist, libertarian vice presidential candidate — and I expect we’ll see many of those thrown around today. But “villain” is the one that suited him best…’ David Koch reshaped America for the worse. His life's work was the destruction of others

…’Alongside his older brother Charles, he built his family’s company into one of the US’s biggest conglomerates and each brother’s share was estimated to be worth more than $50bn. They used their fortunes to influence American politics in a rightward direction following their libertarian ideology. They wanted to “minimise the role of government and maximise the role of the private economy ... and personal freedoms”, but the brothers’ philosophy was self-serving, protecting their worth and working against regulation of their business interests.’+

The Koch brothers tried to build a plutocracy in the name of freedom

‘The Kochs have always believed that rich people had the right to rule over everyone else, democracy be damned.’

A protester holds up a sign against the Koch Brothers at the ‘People’s Climate March’ in Manhattan in September 2014. Photograph. Photo: theguardian.com

'It is the hope of every rich megalomaniac that they will “leave a legacy”. David Koch, who died last week aged 79, left a significant legacy indeed. In fact, along with his brother Charles, he can probably claim to have changed the world. Unfortunately, he changed it by setting it on fire.

It’s hard to describe just what a negative force the Koch brothers have been in United States politics over the past several decades. They have used every means at their disposal to subvert democracy. They funded academic posts, thinktanks, lobbying groups, fake grassroots operations, and political campaigns. They used their tremendous wealth to push a radically far-right economic vision in which government protections and welfare programs would essentially cease to exist. They may even have been directly responsible for the election of Donald Trump,...

David Koch has now left this earth, while the rest of us are still here to clean up his mess. His brother Charles lingers, and will surely try to keep up the family business of poisoning American politics. We must make sure he does not succeed, and all of humanity can look forward to the day when the Koch Brothers’ influence is nothing but an unpleasant memory.'-Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs

Photo: theoldspeakjournal.com

‘Everyone knows that millions of Americans are in trouble. They’ve lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings. Their grown children have moved back in with them. Their state and local taxes are rising. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut. Why isn’t government working for us? Because it’s been bought off. It’s as simple as that. And until we get clean money we’re not going to get clean elections, and until we get clean elections, you can kiss goodbye government of, by, and for the people. Welcome to the plutocracy.’- Bill Moyers

More on these later. First, it will be most beneficial if I recall what I had noted on the consequences of the Koch brothers demented ideology of neoliberalism on my country, which, by and large, has destroyed everything that was once good and valueable in Britain, so to speak.

Nota bene

Neoliberalism: The Broken Economic Model

(First published as an email to the GCGI members in May 2011)

Dear Friends,

“Do you remember that Margaret Thatcher, the so-called Iron Lady!! She told the Brits that she was going to put the “Great” back into the “Great” Britain. Do you remember? Then, she told us this can only happen if we accept and implement the “Washington Consensus”, the so-called dreaded neo-liberalism. She told us that there was no alternative. She told us we will all prosper and develop more fairly and equitably. She won election after elections. Everything was privatised, deregulated, self-regulated. Industry, manufacturing, (the real economy) was destroyed. Instead, the banks and the bankers were encouraged to rule the world. The economists with no principles and values were “bought” and the business schools, such as Harvard and Columbia were showered with money to act as “Cheerleaders” for the dreaded neoliberalism (see the Inside Job for evidence). Communities were dis-mantled and dis-organised. We were told that there is nothing as a society and community. We are all in it just for ourselves, we were told. Destructive competition at the expense of life-enhancing cooperation, collaboration and dialogue was greatly prompted. We were told to say no to love, kindness, generosity, sympathy and empathy and say yes to selfishness, individualism and narcissism, as these values will fire the engine of capitalism and wealth creation! In short, the hell with the common good, we were encouraged to believe.

We were brained-washed. Our other Prime Ministers repeated her nonsense and have carried on her footsteps. It is now over 30 years since the neo-liberalism experiment in Britain. Are we any “Greater” than we were in 1979? Are we any fairer or more equitable? The country is nearly bankrupt, with public and private debt at unprecedented levels, with the greatest levels of poverty and wealth disparity ever. The house of neo-liberal capitalism is now at its nadir of decadence.”

You see, all those interested in life’s bigger picture, have been saying the same, over and over. The neo-liberals are not in touch with humanity. They will prostitute all in the interest of profit maximization, cost minimization, highest return to shareholders, and the biggest and juiciest bonuses for the CEOs and their lackeys.”- The Broken Economic Model

Read more on the devastation, destruction and lies of neoliberalism:

The World brought down to its knees: The Fallacy of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples

The Destruction of our World and the lies of Milton Friedman

The Neoliberal Road to Serfdom

People’s Tragedy: Neoliberal Legacy of Thatcher and Reagan

Neoliberalism destroys human potential and devastates values-led education

Neoliberalism and the rise in global loneliness, depression and suicide

Why are people in the US living shorter lives?

The Story of Thatcher’s Privatisation Series: Rewarding of Greed and Incompetence for fleecing the public

Selling off our Motherland: The Biggest Crime of the Broken Economic Model

Economic Growth: The Index of Misery

The Neoliberal Road to Serfdom

How markets became masters and humans became ‘serfers’**!

(** A Serfer is the modern equivalent to bonded labour of the olden days (KM). This is the world’s most widespread form of modern slavery, thanks largely to the lies of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples. )

“We have become, in the United States, and increasingly all over the world, a society with only two classes: Those who own, and those who owe.” –Thom Hartmann

Owners and Owers- Rich and Poor

Photo: pinterest.com

“The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome.”

A reflection on the global application of a fraudulent economic theory which has brought the world to its knees. Yet for those in power, it offers riches well beyond the wildest dreams of the ordinary working classes.

Death and destruction. That is David Koch’s legacy.*

Alex Kotch, Via The Guardian

‘Anarcho-capitalism was the real cancer plaguing the billionaire libertarian. And it spread across universities, halls of Congress and the White House.’

This is the tragic mindset of many a rightwing oligarch: the toils, the woes, the maladies of humankind are irrelevant – unless they happen to me, or perhaps my close family members’

'In 1992, billionaire industrialist David Koch was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and given just a few years to live. Thanks to his enormous wealth, he was able to purchase the best treatment in the world, and he survived 27 more years until his death last week.

For all his adult life, he’d led Koch Industries, a diversified manufacturing conglomerate, with his older brother Charles. Now taking in around $110bn per year, the company creates chemicals and fertilizers; it produces synthetic materials such as Lycra; it sells lumber and churns out paper and glass products; it makes electronics components used in weapons systems. But first and foremost, Koch Industries mines and refines petroleum and operates pipelines to spread it throughout North America.

Koch Industries, a private company, is the United States’ 17th-largest producer of greenhouse gases and the 13th-biggest water polluters, according to research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst – ahead of oil giants Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum and Phillips 66. The conglomerate has committed hundreds of environmental, workplace safety, labor and other violations. It allegedly stole oil from Indian reservations, won business in foreign countries with bribery, and one of its crumbling butane pipelines killed two teenagers, resulting in a nearly $300m wrongful death settlement. The dangerous methane leakage, carbon emissions, chemical spills and other environmental injustices enacted by Koch’s companies have imperiled the planet and allegedly brought cancer to many people. But it took Koch’s own struggle with the disease for him to care about cancer and fund research to combat it.

This is the tragic mindset of many a rightwing oligarch: The toils, the woes, the maladies of humankind are irrelevant – unless they happen to me, or perhaps my close family members. I’ve never struggled to live on $7.25 per hour, so why is it a problem? An ailment has never caused me to go bankrupt, so why would anyone possibly need government subsidies to pay for life-saving medical care? Climate change has never directly affected my life so I’ll keep on denying that humans have anything to do with it. Even though I inherited a business and a fortune, I earned every cent of my astronomical net worth. If you worked as hard as I have, you would have what I have, too.

Koch epitomized this grotesquely selfish mentality during his 1980 vice presidential campaign on the Libertarian ticket, when he ran on abolishing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, welfare benefits, the minimum wage and the Environmental Protection Agency. He put $2m of his own money into the effort and campaigned to ax all campaign finance laws so he and his brother could maximize their bloated political influence without any pesky rules attempting to honor the constitutional premise of American elections: “One person, one vote.”

It is this cruel mindset that was the real cancer plaguing David Koch. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would spread itself into university curricula, the halls of Congress, regulatory agencies, and the White House. It possessed the unfathomably rich who came before him, and it will infect the opulent oligarchs who come after him. It is the cult of anarcho-capitalism, the faithful worship of the divine free market that has shined so brightly on Koch and his family. If only we could do away with government altogether, we’d become a true utopian society: a handful of corporate monarchs ruling over billions of wretched serfs who toil away until their deaths, faithfully adding zeros to the quarterly revenues of the select few at their own fatal expense.

Not only did Koch help unleash countless metric tons of greenhouse gases from the earth, he was a key funder of climate change denialism, stiff-arming scientists in order to further plunder the earth he was destroying. Revelations in Christopher Leonard’s new book, Kochland, show that Koch played an even greater role in funding climate change denialism than we previously knew. As we careen towards a climate catastrophe that seems more and more likely to happen within the next 11 years, we can rightly pin a portion of the blame on David and his brother.

With Charles, David funded and participated in a network of free-market thinktanks that produced academic literature in support of slashing taxes and gutting regulations in order to aid mega-corporations like Koch Industries. These ideological centers include the Cato Institute, which the Kochs founded and where David was a longtime board member; the American Enterprise Institute, where he was a member of its National Council; George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies; and the Heritage Foundation. Now alumni of the Koch academic and policy networks have become government administrators, regulatory officials, political advisers and lifetime judges.

In 1984, David co-founded the predecessor to the non-profit Americans for Prosperity (AFP), among the first of many political major groups the brothers would fund and operate. The Kochs increased their political spending and engagement over decades, using AFP and other groups to publicize the thinktanks’ laissez-faire policy proposals and pressure members of Congress to support them. In 2009, AFP helped get the allegedly grassroots Tea Party off the ground, as it and other Koch network organizations began years of campaigning against President Obama’s effort to give millions of low-income Americans health insurance and expanded Medicaid. David has funded research into cancer therapies but appears to believe that only the financially secure deserve treatment.

Spending by the Kochs’ political groups and campaign donations from the Kochs and their company’s Pac made a wave of rightwing ideologues into lawmakers at the state and federal levels. The Tea Party sweep in 2010, a phenomenon that laid the groundwork for a rightwing nationalist president, would not have been nearly what it was without the Koch largesse. Now the Koch political network claims to be distressed at President Trump’s cruel immigration policies and tariff wars, yet the network championed the contemporary far-right movement that has seated countless lawmakers who revel in anti-immigrant and nationalist policymaking.

In the current decade, while Koch-backed state legislators made sweetheart deals with oil and gas companies and crippled the progress of solar companies, Koch beneficiaries in the House and Senate were cutting taxes, undoing federal regulations, and doing all they could to kick millions of Americans off of their health care coverage.

When you walk around Cambridge, Massachusetts, you’ll pass by MIT’s David H Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research or the David H Koch Childcare Center. When taking in upper-crust Manhattan arts and culture, you’ll come across Lincoln Center’s David H Koch Theater. For those who don’t know about Koch’s business and political operations, he must seem like a generous man.

The directors of these institutions are ever grateful to Koch (This is how the super-rich have bought up the universities. KM)

“David Koch was a model philanthropist who funded initiatives across a swath of cultural, scientific, and medical institutions,” Robert Millard, chair of the MIT Corporation, said in MIT News. “His generosity has benefited humanity broadly – from the arts to cancer research to science. MIT is deeply thankful for his many contributions to our community.”

“His contributions to medical research will live on forever; they have and will continue to benefit millions of Americans and others around the world,” said Jonathan Simons, CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, in a tribute to Koch. “We will miss his sense of humor, his wisdom and his insightfulness.”

Koch may have kept some arts institutions on life support, bolstered the Natural History Museum’s dinosaur exhibition, or employed cancer researchers, but we must not let these philanthropic acts cover for a billionaire whose corporate greed has gravely endangered the future of the planet and the human species. This is the point of these seemingly magnanimous contributions: to cast the Kochs in a positive light, deflecting criticism of Koch Industries’ shameful business practices and defending the legacy of a heartless robber baron.

What was the prime motivator behind the life and career of Koch, an MIT-educated chemical engineer who denied the existence, and harms, of man-made climate change? Was it his extreme distaste for authority, birthed during his youth under a strict, Nazi-supporting nanny and an often absent father? Was it a religious commitment to free-market capitalism and an honest belief that the market, if truly unfettered, will solve every daunting problem for humanity? Was it a sincere belief that, although he and his brother were born to a wealthy oil executive, every single poor and working-class person could pull themselves up from nothing, with no help from anyone, in a drastically unequal society, if they just tried harder?

I don’t think it was any of these explanations. The answer is very simple. It was greed, the blind pursuit of horrifying wealth and power. An addiction that has left the country less equal and the planet endangered.

David Koch died as the eleventh-richest man in the world, with an estimated net worth of $51bn. His name is plastered on the facades of New England cancer centers and Manhattan hospitals and performance halls. But these historical imprints are temporary and relatively inconsequential compared to his lasting legacy, something far more significant, and terrifying. Koch’s never-ending quest for obscene wealth no matter the consequences – and that of his brother, his fellow oligarchs and his political allies – will be part of every future climate change-intensified weather disaster; every city undone by catastrophic sea level rise; every animal species that goes extinct because of warmer waters, desertification, or biblical floods; and every desperate climate refugees.'- *Death and destruction. That is David Koch’s legacy.

+David Koch obituary

...And now read about the possible paths on how we may put right what has so tragically gone wrong, on how to stop death and destruction and how we may begin to value and nurture life again

I am positive and hopeful. We can change the world for the better. Come with me on this journey of self discovery in the interest of the common good

Yes, We can win over death and destruction, the neoliberalism, If we listen to the Voice of Hope, echoing across the world,

Composing a New Life

Photo:twr.org

Remaking Economics in an age of economic soul-searching

The World would be a Better Place if Economists had Read This Book

In Praise of Darwin Debunking the Self-seeking Economic Man

Composing a New Life: In Praise of Wisdom

Brexit, Trump and the failure of our universities to pursue wisdom

Calling all academic economists: What are you teaching your students?

Values-free, Market- Driven Education: What a Disaster!

The Journey to Sophia: Education for Wisdom

What is a University?

My Economics and Business Educators’ Oath: My Promise to My Students

What might an Economy for the Common Good look like?

The Age Of Perpetual Crisis: What are we to do in a world seemingly spinning out of our control?

Details: Written by: Kamran Mofid; Published: 27 August 2019; Hits: 3275

This is the Manifesto to Make the World Great Again

The key that will unlock the door to world’s greatness is values-led education

Photo: missionself.com

As Nelson Mandela used to remind us again and again, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. ”Education is the key to eliminating gender inequality, to reducing poverty, to creating a sustainable planet, to preventing needless deaths and illness, and to fostering peace, harmony, justice, egalitarianism, equality, good race relations, progress and prosperity, for many and not the few.

In short, education is an investment, and for that matter, it is one of the most critical investments we can make. I hope that one day soon this will be realised by all, and thus, when it comes to the annual governmental budget allocations, to my mind, spending on education should not be seen as expenditure, but as an investment in people and in humanity.

T.S. Eliot posed the question: "Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

Details: Written by: Kamran Mofid; Published: 25 August 2019; Hits: 2980

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”- Nelson Mandela

This is a Book on Values-led Education that can Change the World for the Better

Photo:amazon.co.uk

About the Authors

Salim Vally and Enver Motala are two of South Africa’s most outspoken critics of the ‘there is no alternative’ view to the hegemonic neoliberal approach to economic development and the place of education within it. In this text they, and a number of eminent colleagues, provide one of the few elaborations in the country of what is wrong with human capital theory, with supply side approaches framing economic policy and with current education strategies which privilege individual advancement.

About the Book

‘Education, Economy and Society is a compelling and comprehensive antidote to the misconstrued nature of the relationship between education and society. It provides a constructive critique of conventional discourses but also alternative approaches to understand the connections between education and the triple scourge of unemployment, inequality and poverty.

Against a tendency to reduce the skills discourse to narrow economic ends, the contributors passionately argue that education finds its value and purpose in a focus on social justice, transformation and democratic citizenship. The joy of education is to capture human imaginations and unleash their creativity towards a more humane and compassionate society.

Here is a rich resource for educators, policy developers, trade unionists, and trainers to explore possibilities for a new pedagogy in post-school education and training through empirical research on skills, technology and issues of employment on the shop floor, critical analysis of the youth wage subsidy and workers’ education. The book will appeal to a wide audience including students and academics in the fields of industrial sociology; economics; adult education; further education and training; and those in youth development.’- See more and purchase this book HERE

...And now read an excellent review of this timely and excellent book and discover how neoliberalism has destroyed democracy, humanity, justice, education and the common good.

Neoliberal policies destroy human potential and devastate education

Steven J Klees, Via Mail&Guardian

Photo:mg.co.za

‘Finding a solution to the triple challenge of poverty, inequality and unemployment has been unproductively directed towards addressing the lack of individual skills and education instead of focusing on capitalism and other world system structures – whose very logic makes poverty, inequality and lack of employment commonplace..

‘We live in an unfair and unequal world. In South Africa, as well as around the world, much attention has been focused on what has been called the “triple challenge”: job creation, poverty reduction and inequality reduction. The dominant response to all three problems is to argue for increased education and skills.

This excellent new book, Education, Economy and Society, edited by Salim Vally and Enver Motala, offers an in-depth critique of the concepts, frameworks, interventions and logic that underlie this dominant response as well as the one that underlies much of the South African education and training policy. Among its many virtues, the book offers a critique of the three basic discourses that are used to support education and skills solutions to current problems.

The “mismatch discourse” goes back at least to the 1950s. In it, education has been blamed for not supplying the skills that business needs.

It is, unfortunately, true that many children and youth around the world leave school without the basic skills necessary for life and work. But the mismatch discourse is usually less about basic skills and more about vocational skills. The argument, though superficially plausible, is not true for at least two reasons.

On the job

First, vocational skills, which are often context-specific, are generally best taught on the job. Second and fundamentally, unemployment is not a worker-supply problem, but a structural problem of capitalism. There are three or more billion unemployed or underemployed people on this planet, not because they don’t have the right skills but because full employment is neither a feature nor a goal of capitalism.

Underlying the skills discourse is the “human capital discourse”. In the 1950s and earlier, the neoclassical economics framework that underpins capitalist ideology and practice could not explain labour. Although the overall neoclassical framework was embodied in mathematical models of a fictitious story of supply and demand by small producers and consumers, it was not clear how to apply that to labour, work and employment.

Instead, in that era, labour economics was more sociological and based on the real world, trying to understand institutions such as unions and large companies, and phenomena such as strikes, collective bargaining and public policy.

The advent of human capital theory in the 1960s offered a way to deal with labour in terms of supply and demand (mostly supply), as a commodity like any other. This took the sociology out of labour economics. Education was seen as an investment in individual skills that made one more productive and employable.

Although this supply-side focus is sometimes true, it is very partial, at best. That is, abilities such as literacy, numeracy, teamwork, problem-solving, critical thinking and so on can have a payoff in the job market, but only in a context where such skills are valued.

Demand-side questions

The more useful and important question is the demand-side one, usually ignored by human capital theorists, regarding how we can create good jobs that require valuable skills. The human capital discourse also ignores the value of education outside of work.

In fact, contrary to the hype, the human capital discourse, and offshoots of it – such as the knowledge economy – has been one of the most destructive ideas of this century and the one before.

Finding a solution to the triple challenge of poverty, inequality and unemployment has been unproductively directed towards addressing the lack of individual skills and education instead of focusing on capitalism and other world system structures – whose very logic makes poverty, inequality and lack of employment commonplace.

Underlying the human capital discourse, most directly since the 1980s, has been the “neoliberal discourse”. This is tied to neoclassical economics. From the 1930s to the 1970s, in various countries, a liberal neoclassical economics discourse predominated. This discourse recognised some of the inequalities inherent in capitalism and argued the need for government interventions as a corrective.

Government interference

With political shifts exemplified by Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Helmut Kohl in Germany, a neoliberal neoclassical economics discourse took over, which argued that capitalism was both efficient and equitable, that problems were generally minor, and that the source of any problems was too much government interference.

This discourse has gone beyond economics and has political, social and cultural dimensions. In education, the upshot of neoliberal discourse has been to ignore the problems faced by public schools and to promote market solutions through private schools, vouchers, charters and the like.

Skills and human capital are central to many of the chapters in Vally and Motala’s book, and a critique of neoliberalism forms the context for their analyses. Although the left is often criticised, falsely, for an economic determinism, the book points out how the right, in the discourses above, practices its own version of economic determinism: education leads to skills, skills lead to employment, employment leads to economic growth, economic growth creates jobs and is the way out of poverty and inequality.

The book shows in great detail the failures and disingenuousness of the arguments of the right in casting the blame for education and development problems. Mismatch, human capital and neoliberal discourses first and foremost blame individuals for their lack of “investment” in human capital, for their not attending school, for their dropping out of school, for their not studying the “right” fields, for their lack of entrepreneurship.

The only solution is education

If you hold neoliberal views, the only legitimate solution to the triple challenge is education, other than removing government from any “interference” in the market. That is, if you are a market fundamentalist, it is illegitimate for government to do anything. Neoliberals even look upon government-sponsored education with suspicion; hence the call for privatisation, vouchers, charters, merit pay, and so forth.

But blaming education, as Stephanie Allais and Oliver Nathan say in their chapter, is a “con”, that is, a scam, a ploy. John Treat, in his chapter, quotes Marc Levine: “Put another way, there’s a strong ideological component behind the skills gap [argument]: it diverts attention (and policies) from the deep inequalities and market fundamentalism that created the unemployment crisis, and focuses on a fake skills gap that had nothing to do with the surge in joblessness.”

Human capital theory and neoliberal economics are examples of what has been called “zombie economics”. Treat quotes John Quiggin’s explanation of zombie economics: they are “beliefs about economic policy that have been ‘killed’ by evidence and analysis, but somehow, like ‘zombie ideas’, keep coming back’.”

For the right, the value of education is reduced to economics. This fundamentally contradicts the essence of education, a refrain throughout the book. In fact, the book is dedicated to and opens with a quote from Neville Alexander to this effect and it is worth repeating part of it here: “Once the commodity value of people displaces their intrinsic human worth or dignity, we are well on the way to a state of barbarism.”

A dual system of education

A global view shows how, with capital freely mobile, we are faced with a planetary-wide reserve army of the unemployed and underemployed that keeps wages down, workers insecure and unions weak. In education, everywhere, there are schools for the rich and very different schools for the poor. This is hardly acknowledged, let alone challenged.

Neoliberal capitalism is also racialist capitalism, patriarchal capitalism, plutocratic and monopoly capitalism. The left has been caricatured as having a conspiracy theory understanding of capitalism’s operation and motives. Long ago most of the left rejected the need for a conspiracy. World system structures maintain capitalism, racialism, patriarchy and so on. But I wouldn’t reject the idea of collusion out of hand. What else is the World Economic Forum but a meeting of the global, dare I say, ruling elite in an undemocratic forum to decide on global policies? Nowhere, of course, does the right see the inherent problems in the structure of capitalism nor even recognise neoliberalism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, right-wing books proclaimed the end of history, the end of ideology – we now had the one best system and we just had to tinker with it and wait for prosperity to sweep the globe.

Well, how long are we willing to wait? While millions are suffering and dying and the rich get obscenely rich at the expense of the rest of us? It has become commonplace to recognise that capitalism has increased material production and wealth – even Marx did – but production for whom? Wealth for whom? The most obscene statistic I’ve heard is that the 85 richest individuals on the planet have the same total wealth as the poorest 3.5-billion people on the planet.

Can capitalism be tamed?

Can capitalism be improved, be fair and just? I am not clairvoyant, I can’t see the future. I have liberal, even progressive, colleagues who believe that capitalism can be tamed in the broader social interest.

I wish it were so, but I don’t think so. The greed and inequality promoted by capitalism, the racialism and sexism and environmental destruction that capitalism takes advantage of and promotes are extraordinarily resistant to change. Governments, captured by elites and by the unequal logic inherent in our world system, can only with great difficulty offer significant challenges.

But Education, Economy and Society goes well beyond the failure of current discourses and realities. Throughout, chapter authors consider alternative perspectives and policies that may move us in more progressive directions.

These include the need for and existence of what editors Motala and Vally call “vital and vibrant” social movements to challenge world system structures. Sheri Hamilton situates her chapter on worker education in global movements: anti-globalisation, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Indignados in Spain, anti-austerity in Europe, strike waves in South Africa – and I would add the earlier anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and the civil rights movement in the US, the women’s movement around the world, the landless movement in Brazil, the Dalit movement in India, and many others.

I teach a course called Alternative Education, Alternative Development, which focuses on what to do from a critical progressive perspective, and I would like to close by adding to the list of alternatives above.

In terms of development:

We can be inspired by the potential for democratic electoral politics, despite its limits, to bring half a dozen Latin American countries left, progressive governments;
Even limited gains are valuable. For example, some say South Africa has the most progressive constitution in the world and some say Brazil has the best child legislation in the world. In both cases, they are far from making it a reality, but it still represents progress and can be – and is – a focal point for struggle; and
We can build on experiments with alternatives to business as usual around the globe in the form of co-operatives, worker ownership and workplace democracy.

In terms of education (I know Latin America better than Africa):

In Brazil, the Citizen School movement has built a sizeable democratic, participatory, Freirean-based education system in a number of places inside and outside Brazil;
In Venezuela, Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution instituted a large-scale Higher Education for All system; and
In Brazil again, there are the Landless Movement schools, founded by some of the poorest people in the world – often living off agricultural labour, now organised and politically influential – with a large system of very participatory, democratic, Freirean-based schools.

I don’t mean to romanticise any of this. This is a struggle over the long haul and the outcome is uncertain; but, as I said, I am optimistic. I am optimistic because of the examples above. I am also optimistic because I was fortunate enough to attend the World Social Forum in Brazil twice and to march with 100 000 activists from all over the world. I met some of those who are struggling to change the world in areas such as education, health, food, water, environment and development.’-Mail&Guardian

Steven J Klees is professor of international and comparative education at the University of Maryland, US. This is an edited version of the address he will deliver on July 22 at the launch of Education, Economy and Society, co-edited by Salim Vally and Enver Motala and published by Unisa Press