Okay, what you were saying there at the end about the rich declaring independence from humanity reminded me of a quote from William Gibson who said, the rich aren't human anymore. And I think that's part of the shock of the death of Steve Jobs, right? We sort of want to believe in some sense the rich aren't human and that they'll be able to beat death. So when even the super rich died, there's no hope for any of us. But, okay, so I'm just going to talk a bit about this concept of capitalist realism and its relationship to education. And really a lot of the thinking that went into the development of the concept of capitalist realism was a direct response to work in education.
Many of the anecdotes in the book come from my experience not teaching in universities, but teaching precisely this age group that's crucial that Dave was alluding to, of 16 to 19 year olds, many of whom were in a way forced into staying in education. because of lack of opportunities elsewhere. That's part of the dynamic of engaging with these students who really didn't want to be studying philosophy, critical thinking, religious studies, which is what I was teaching them. They didn't want to be studying anything, but there was nothing else down for them. They're producing one of them sort of many tensions in the classroom. I mean, capitalist realism, as I often say,
is easier to identify than it is to define. Partly it's hard to define because of its diffuse nature. What we're talking about is really a transpersonal ideological field, ideological atmosphere, to do with a certain form of acquiescence, and a certain form of fatalism, really. If you put this in individual psychological terms, which is problematic, I think, because the individual psychological manifestations are symptoms or rather facts of this transpersonal ideological field. If you put it in those terms, however, we can see capitalist realism as a belief, first of all.
A belief that capitalism is the only viable political economic system. this is the realism of it and this is what Mrs Thatcher meant when she said that there's no alternative but even the meaning of that phrase has shifted when Thatcher first said that there's no alternative she meant there are alternatives but you wouldn't want to follow them that they don't work and our model the neoliberal cell was, okay, this might be painful, but it would be beneficial. And we just have to accept this is how things are now. And often with the capitalist realism,
there's this kind of faux sorrow. We might have liked to have believed in socialist utopias, but we know they don't work now. So we've got to face this is how things are and deal with the reality of things instead of creating castles in the air. So, I mean, but I mean, capitalist realism, as I understand it, really, is a pathology of the left, which emerges then not only as this belief, which is propagated by the new right, by neoliberals, but which then is, as it emerges as a kind of leftist pathology, is an attitude of resignation in relation to this. it's not that you necessarily accept the neoliberal story
as being actually true but you accept that it's the dominant story and that we have to come to terms with that we accept that they are the most powerful force the direction of history is moving with them and that we either come to some accommodation with that or we face irrelevance and essentially this was the guiding thought of New Labour and Tony Blair in the UK as really almost the leading brand of leftist acquiescence for the world really. In a way, Blair led the way in showing how left parties could capitulate to capitalism. really. So it's no accident
though really that a lot of these ideas and a lot of my thinking about Capitalist Realism was shaped really by working in an educational institution at the very zenith of Blairism really. I think part of the problem in describing Capitalist Realism in the way that I have is that it's in a way too grand, in a way already too political a way of thinking about it. The way that capitalist realism actually operates on the ground I think is much more banal and it operates via this submission to the imperatives of business really which in a certainly in the UK education system we've seen models being imposed and in
terms of the state that these kind of carceral surveillance regime that David was talking about, particularly what we found as the forms of self-surveillance, new kinds of bureaucratic labour become imposed on the model of business. And where things have to be run, education has to be run like a business. Which not only means running at a profit, but also means that the strategies of business discipline, the strategies of increasing performance, or the strategies which have their rationale as the increasing of efficiency of workers, also become imposed in the public sector, with education at the leading edge of this. You know, ludicrous kind of confessional
documents, massive kind of logbooks which teachers have to produce, which I call kind of market Stalinism, which is really then, I don't think hyperbolic at all. I mean, this was Blairism. Blairism was a form of market Stalinism, where, you know, all of the elements, many of the elements of Stalinism, five-year plans, targets, etc., re-emerge like the return of the repressed but now given a neoliberal gloss. And these ludicrous documents that are completely disconnected from reality, the only function of which is to... When we had to fill in one of these documents, one of the managers said to us,
Yeah, you haven't got enough criticisms in this document. Okay, it's this form of a mandatory Maoism as well, Stalinism. And then he said, well, look, okay, you have to put more criticisms in. And then he said, well, don't worry, no one will read it. So this kind of double level demoralisation that is demanded. You know, as part of your job, you have to demoralise yourself. then you have to the further level of demoralisation of realising the exercise is a purely paper one. But of course these things are not just useless. It's not as if they've failed in their aims. Everyone has to distinguish their real aims from their ostensible aims. The real aim of these neoliberal strategies has nothing to do with the increasing of the efficiency of workers.
It has to do with the production of anxiety and deprofessionalisation. And this for me, what is key about this, and particularly in relation to, and why education is key, there's lots of dimensions to this, is it reveals the paradoxes of neoliberalism, the inconsistency of neoliberalism. But neoliberalism, in its pitch, its great appeal to the public, insofar as it had one, was individual freedom versus bureaucracy, versus the state. Okay, the state, this was the great founding myth of neoliberalism, as it took over the global north from the 80s onwards.
The myth was, okay, the state is inefficient, it's an oppressive presence in people's lives, we will liberate you from the state. This certainly isn't true for teachers. This certainly isn't true for teachers. If one was to look back to, in the UK for sure, if one was to look back to the 70s, you know, the pre-Neo-Liberal era, it was a halcyon period in retrospect for teachers. where the level of control over what the teacher could teach, the level of professional autonomy the teacher had, was massively in excess of what teachers have got now, where they are constrained by a highly centralised bureaucratic apparatus. How can this be? How can this be the case?
How can there be this claim of neoliberalism to have liberated us from the state, yet what we've actually seen is the massive increase, not only of centralised state control, but of a more pernicious form of decentralised control, which is ultimately contracted out to the individual teachers themselves. You know, we have to oppress ourselves now. This is the difference. And key to this in the UK is the development of their Office for Standards and Education, which emerged under Thatcher in the late 80s. and now has a tyrannical grip over the compulsory education system and of teachers,
which has devastating psychic consequences for teachers. The level of mental illness, suicide, etc., that have massively increased as the tyranny of Ofsted, i.e. state bureaucratic control of education on the neoliberal model, i.e. the worst of all worlds. This all typifies public institutions in the UK now. A mixture of kind of, a mixture of state intervention to a high degree with neoliberal managerialist bullshit. You know, this is the model. Which certainly has nothing to do with individual freedom, not the teachers anyway. anyway.
I mean, one way of thinking about this theoretically and following up from the language David was using was in the terms established by Deleuze in I think one of his most important essays and certainly one of his most important political interventions, which is I think the essay from 1990, highly prescient and lucid on postscripts on societies of control, where Deleuze makes distinction from Foucault between societies of disciplined societies of control and in fact the shift from a kind of state-administrated school-hospital-prison matrix as described by Foucault to control by corporations effectively.
But what we've seen, I think, part of the problems with education is that, and David brought this out in a way, is that the disciplinary model has not been superseded, it's in a way the shift into control and a different kind of interpolation and a confused interpolation for students has produced this kind of inconsistent hybrid where elements of social control, I mean, as David pointed out, increasingly education and teachers have to bear the responsibility for social control and increasingly a lot the struggles that teachers have to face, concern the management and socialisation duties, which are poorly performed. Primary socialisation is poorly performed by the family because of
pressures on the family of various kinds, for instance. So those disciplinary functions are there, but students are also now told that they are consumers. So students are both the objects of discipline in the old way, but also the consumers. And this produces a mixed model, a disastrously mixed model, about what students' relationship to teachers, producing a crisis of authority, where students' relationship to teachers is unclear. Am I like a supermarket providing them with a service which they can complain about, or am I an old-style disciplinary figure who has authority over them? Nobody knows. Now, post-2008, I think,
in 2008, we would have thought things might have changed with the bank crisis. But what we've seen is really an intensification of capitalist realism. In a way, this metaphor of zombies is correct, that neoliberalism overnight was discredited. I think the term discredited has never been more appropriate. Overnight discredited, but so what? It doesn't matter. You don't need legitimacy to function, because neoliberalism is the occupying power. Okay. I've got that much on my page. Okay, never mind.
I'll speak up a bit. Neon-liberism installed itself over a 30 year period and became a set of institutional defaults. They won't disappear just because there's no legitimacy or strong momentum behind the project. They have to be dismantled by an alternative kind of political agent. Such an agent is not there. That's clear. What worries me about what Mike is saying ease the potential rhyming or consonance with neoliberal strategies. What we saw in the UK with the Tory-led coalition was this, it kind of utterly failed,
but nevertheless it sort of told us about what they were trying to do, this concept of a big society in a pathetically failed gambit but nevertheless the idea is not a big state but a big society which in other words legitimates the state's withdrawal from providing education public services of all kinds because people can just do it themselves somehow and you know what worries me is letting the state off the hook in a way from its obligations and that then becomes another excuse for another opportunity for privatisation because when the state withdraws the corporations move in. I think that's part of what David's saying also. In a way the state's a
compromised formation. I think that's the way to see it. Not that it should be clear to us now that the state is not the model to develop a socialism communism on its own. Whatever we want to call the leftist project and part of the crisis isn't what we want to actually call this project now. But it's clear in the 80s that state socialism was not the right project. So yes, the idea that the state would deliver all our political goals, that's clearly wrong. But the idea that we can completely withdraw from the state, I think is also a mistake. And again, I think slightly intentionally with what Mike said, The problem for me is not that things weren't anarchist enough after 2008,
but that the prevailing ideas on the left are too anarchist for me. And the most dominant ideas of what is left of the organised left, or remains of the organised left, are what I call neo-anarchist ideas. In a way, we're echoing neoliberalism, really, which is a hostility to the state, concept of horizontalism, of kind of collapse of hierarchies as a prefigurative gesture. Now my problem with this is not those things themselves, it's not that I'm in favour of hierarchies, it's that nevertheless we have to take power seriously, and you can't just will it away,
by an act of will just dissolve power power needs dismantling and I think part of the problem is an equivalence between anti-authoritarianism and being anti-authority which means that the only accounts of what authority is belong to the right and are effectively authoritarian what we need is a left wing account of what authority is and legitimate authority is, where legitimate collective and democratic authority is. And that's the way to deliver an anti-authoritarian project, is not by abandoning the question of authority, but by thinking about how we constitute it in a better form.
And otherwise we're left in, with the imperatives of neo-anarchism, post-68 neo-anarchism, if you're a teacher, i.e. in a position of authority, you're in a position of self-loathing insofar as you occupy that position which is a position of weakness to say the least I think we hate each other enough or we hate ourselves enough rather and we should stop that and I think then that just to put it fairly schematically the retreat from the state has failed the leftist kind of post 68 retreat from the state has failed but all that happens if we retreat from the state same as if we retreat from mainstream media and these are the two enemies of neo-anarchism
are the idea of mainstream media and the state it's not that I think these things are great in the form that they're in but if we withdraw from them if the left withdraws from them the right says thank you very much and the anti-statist rhetoric from the left has facilitated the right wing takeover of the state and the state remains important for the delivery of neoliberalism if it didn't, why do they spend so much money and effort controlling it you couldn't have neoliberal dominance without control of the state which isn't to say that we should which isn't to say that we should
then be satisfied with taking over the state that might be a starting point but it's clearly not enough in itself and I think politically speaking this is a problem of articulation that what the right is the right have been better revolutionaries than ours and they've been better at post-modernists than us in the sense that the right has achieved a total switch over in people's subjectivities institutions, etc. We've seen this. People of my age and all have seen the shift from social democracy into a wholly different kind of social system and system of production
of subjectivity. We need to learn from this, which isn't to say to copy it. The role of institutions has been crucial in that. They've on the one hand disdained institutions, on on the other hand ruthlessly instrumentalise them to their own purposes. Given that this retreat has failed, we need a medium to long term strategy of at least a decade ahead of thinking about how we can reoccupy Parliament, how we can reoccupy mainstream media but that this is not sufficient in itself, we need to articulate this with other struggles So that, you know, the one lesson is, I mean, what happens if you try to work entirely within those systems is Blairism.
You know, we need the connection between the anti-capitalist struggles on the street, all of the movements that have emerged, and we need to coordinate these in the same way the right does. The right has a heterogeneous set of groups with heterogeneous interests, but which nevertheless can come together to form a power block and a reality system. We need the same. We don't have to agree with each other. We have to agree with each other sufficiently to operate as a coordinated block in order to create a new reality system. Part of what I'm saying is to summarise, this can't be done directly. It can't be done directly and it can't be done immediately.
The rights are more patient than us. They're prepared to go to do more boring meetings. We want things to be exciting but they end up boring. We want politics to be a carnival or a party. It ends up a boring party which doesn't even achieve anything. And instead of, if you go to a few boring meetings, that actually becomes exciting because you can make hegemonic rant by doing this. The right know this. They're happy with us out there with ghetto blasters. And happy out there with our own tents. Because they know that that is something that's easily rooted around.
And that change is a matter of indirect action, not direct action. And it's attritional and takes a long time. Okay, no minutes left. Okay, so what I'm going to do is, I'm going to kind of put this down to 15 minutes.