[lbo-talk] Graeber's latest...

Adam Proctor proctorvt at gmail.com
Fri May 11 12:54:40 PDT 2012


Doug wrote:
> Sure, but the permeation of the choice & competition agenda combined with extensive tests (provided by profit-making enterprises) has brought things to a new level. The schools were always embedded in capitalist society, but market behavior is permeating it in new ways.

No question there. 100% in agreement. My target was the sentiment that most folks, of all political stripes, express which is that public schools are little socialistic enterprises--that they exist in opposition to capital. We should absolutely defend public education, but not because it contains the prefigured seeds of socialism or whatever utopian ideology.

My argument is against anyone--especially Graeber--who wants to see a pre-existing "enclave" of resistance as the answer (hell, even AN answer) to the awfulness of capitalism. And come on, David... The Paris Commune was a prefiguration?? No, for a while it was the real thing! He can't seem to distinguish between a few hundred unemployed kids squatting in a park and hundreds of thousands of workers expelling the bosses, forming a workers government, reopening factories, and so on. There is definitely a quantitative/qualitative argument to be made here.

Graeber seems to get worse with every article... David: stop. Just stop, now.



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