The Globalisation Lectures at SOAS - Now Online

THE GLOBALISATION LECTURES AT SOAS – NOW ONLINE

Women and the ‘Arab Spring’: Lessons from Iran?

Haideh Moghissi, Professor and Trudeau Fellow, Department of Equity Studies, York University, Toronto

6 March 2013

Is Islamism the Arab Destiny?

Aziz Al-Azmeh, CEU University Professor, School of Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies, Central European University, Budapest

6 February 2013

Which Democracy for a Multipolar World?

Chantal Mouffe, Professor of political theory and director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster

28 November 2012

Globalisation in Time: Between the Camera and the Clock

Marcus Verhagen, Art historian and critic, Sotheby’s Institute of Art and Goldsmiths College, University of London

31 October 2012

Men who Tiptoe into their Marital Bedrooms: The Novelist and Dictatorship

Hisham Matar

5 March 2012

Inclusion and Participation: a New Agenda for the Globalised Economy

Heiner Flassbeck (Director on Globalization and Development Strategies, UNCTAD)

1 February 2012

Corporate Takeovers, Internet Challenges: does journalism have a future?

Dr Serge Halimi (Director, Le Monde Diplomatique)

2 March 2011

Nobel Prize Winner Dr Shirin Ebadi on The Role of Women in Promoting Peace in the Middle East

Dr Shirin Ebadi (Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003)

2 February 2011

World Literature and World Languages

Tariq Ali (Novelist, Playwright and Historian; Editor - New Left Review)

1 December 2010

Peasant Struggles and Ecology in the Age of Globalisation

Hugo Blanco (Leader of the Peasant Confederation, Peru)

27 October 2010

Humanitarianism at the Risk of Imperialism

Dr Rony Brauman (1999 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Former President of Doctors without Borders (MSF, Paris))

3 March 2010

For a Green and Just Way out of the Global Crisis

Dr Susan George

20 January 2010

The American Empire in Light of the Global Crisis

Professor Alex Callinicos and Professor Leo Panitch

25 November 2009

Noam Chomsky: Crises and the Unipolar Moment

Professor Noam Chomsky

27 October 2009

The World’s Third Spaces: Neither Global Nor National?

Prof. Saskia Sassen - Lynd Professor Of Sociology And Member, The Committee On Global Thought, At Columbia University (New York)

25 February 2009

Beyond Neoliberal Globalisation And Us Hegemony: What Next?

Prof. Samir Amin - Director Of The Third World Forum (Dakar, Senegal)

26 November 2008

The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire

Prof. Ellen Meiksins Wood Professor Emerita of Political Science at York University (Toronto, Canada)

29 October 2008

Counter-Hegemonic Globalisation: Has the Movement Reached its Limits?

Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos

22 April 2008

New Left Wing Governments in South America. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador: A First Balance-Sheet

Dr Eric Toussaint (World Social Forum and Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt)

25 February 2008

The Present Financial Crisis: How to Stop Globalisation from Eating Itself

Robert Wade, Professor of Political Economy and Development (LSE)

22 January 2008

First Published at: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/online-the-globalisation-lectures-at-soas-u.-of-london

**END**

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The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame

THE FALLING RATE OF LEARNING AND THE NEOLIBERAL ENDGAME

By David J. Blacker

Zero Books

Paperback £15.99 || $26.95

Dec 13, 2013. 978-1-78099-578-6.

See: http://www.zero-books.net/books/falling-rate-learning-neoliberal-endgame

BUY | AMAZON US | AMAZON UK

eBook £6.99 || $9.99

Dec 13, 2013. 978-1-78099-579-3.

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Outline

The current neoliberal mutation of capitalism has evolved beyond the days when the wholesale exploitation of labor underwrote the world system’s expansion. While “normal” business profits plummet and theft-by-finance rises, capitalism now shifts into a mode of elimination that targets most of us—along with our environment—as waste products awaiting managed disposal.
The education system is caught in the throes of this eliminationism across a number of fronts: crushing student debt, impatience with student expression, the looting of vestigial public institutions and, finally, as coup de grâce, an abandonment of the historic ideal of universal education. “Education reform” is powerless against eliminationism and is at best a mirage that diverts oppositional energies. The very idea of education activism becomes a comforting fiction.
Educational institutions are strapped into the eliminationist project—the neoliberal endgame—in a way that admits no escape, even despite the heroic gestures of a few. The school systems that capitalism has built and directed over the last two centuries are fated to go down with the ship. It is rational therefore for educators to cultivate a certain pessimism. Should we despair? Why, yes, we should—but cheerfully, as confronting elimination, mortality, is after all our common fate. There is nothing and everything to do in order to prepare.

Endorsements

“While it is no surprise that casino capitalism is in crisis and is spurring protests all over the world, few theorists connect the dots and analyze how this crisis moves through and is affected by a range of institutions. David Blacker has written a superb book in which matters of education, agency, economic justice and collective struggle come alive in both a language of critique and possibility. There will be no endgame to neoliberalism without critically thinking subjects who fight back collectively. This is the book that should be read to create the formative culture that makes such a struggle possible.” ~ Henry A. Giroux, author, America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, Professor of Communication Studies, McMaster University

“David Blacker provides a mordantly clear-eyed assessment of our predicament. He asks hard questions, in the tradition of our best gadflies, and reveals even harder truths, doing us and our 'democracy' (such as it is) a great potential service. Read rightly, Blacker's book, far from making you want to bury your head in the sand even deeper, will inspire you to shake yourself out of your slumber and do your part to arrest this pernicious development. We ignore his important work at our own peril.” ~ Christopher Phillips, author, Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy, Senior Writing Fellow, University of Pennsylvania

“Invigorating pessimism.” ~ Mark Fisher, author, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London

“David Blacker’s book should be required reading for everyone marching circles in schools and universities.” ~ Douglas Lain, author, Billy Moon: 1968 and host of the Diet Soap Podcast

“The notion that widespread educational attainment is the key to widespread prosperity has long been a pillar of the dominant ideology. David Blacker’s central—and centrally important—insight is that the Great Recession has made this notion (which was always dubious) hopelessly anachronistic. When so many people have become superfluous to the capitalist system--mass joblessness persists four years after the recession officially ended--what have also become superfluous are these people’s skills, the schools that educate them, and the spending that funds the schools. And a capitalism mired in crisis just isn’t a capitalism that can afford to pay for what it doesn’t need. But isn’t this only a temporary situation? Drawing on Karl Marx’s falling-rate-of-profit theory and his associated theory of relative surplus (superfluous) population, Blacker warns that it may well be permanent and he urges us to face this prospect soberly and respond accordingly.” ~ Andrew Kliman, author, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession, Professor of Economics, Pace University

**END**

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

'Cheerful Sin' – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

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