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GANGSTER CAPITALISM
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux
currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship
at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies
Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at
Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy,
appear on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing. He was recently named one
of the century's 50 most significant contributors to the
debate on education.
Fascism
is capitalism in decay.
Lenin
Capitalism has
always been constructed on the basis of organized violence.
Wedded to a political and economic system that consolidates
power in the hands of a financial, cultural social elite,
it construes profit making as the essence of democracy and
consuming as the only obligation of citizenship. Matters
of ethics, social responsibility, the welfare state, and
the social contract are viewed as enemies of the market,
thus legitimating the subordination of human needs to a
relentless drive for accumulating profits at the expense
of vital social needs and the larger public. Driven by a
ruthless emphasis on privatization, deregulation, commodification,
a sclerotic individualism and ruthless model of competition—neoliberal
capitalism has morphed into a machinery of death—an
unabashed form of gangster capitalism.
No longer able
to live up to its promises of equality, improved social
conditions, and rising social mobility, it now suffers from
a legitimation crisis. No longer able to defend an agenda
that has produced staggering levels of inequality, decimated
labour rights, provided massive tax breaks to the financial
elite, bailouts to big capital, and waged an incessant war
on the welfare state, neoliberalism needed a new ideology
to sustain itself politically.
As Prabhat Patnaik,
observes, the most radical fix to the potential collapse
of neoliberalism “came in the form of neofascism.”
Neoliberalism’s failure has resulted in its aligning
itself with appeals to overt racism, white supremacy, white
Christian nationalism, a politics of disposability, and
a hatred of those deemed other. As an unapologetic form
of gangster capitalism, violence is wielded as an honourable
political discourse and education as a cultural politics
has become both divisive and injurious. The flattening of
culture, elevated to new extremes through the social media
and the normalization of manufactured ignorance, has become
a major educational weapon in the annihilation of the civic
imagination, politics, and any sense of shared citizenship.
The American
public lives in an age of fragmentation, psychic numbing,
declining critical functions, and the loss of historical
memory, all of which allow for the domestication of the
unimaginable. Gangster capitalism thrives on the silence
of the oppressed and the complicity of those seduced by
its power. It is a politics of subjugation and denial, relentlessly
aiming for a public that internalizes its own oppression
as second nature. As an educational project, it trades in
moral blindness, historical amnesia, and racial and class
hatred. It boldly embraces white Christian nationalism,
violence as a crucial element of politics, and uses state
power to crush dissent and all forms of critical education,
especially those pedagogical practices related to sexual
orientation, critical race theory, and a critical rendering
of history.
Under such circumstances,
the ghosts of fascism are once again on the march. Market
mentalities, a politics of racial cleansing, and a politics
of social and historical amnesia increasingly tighten their
grip on all aspects of society. One consequence is that
democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized,
if not altogether disappearing, along with educated citizens,
without which the fate of democracy is doomed.
Against a fascism
that draws much of its energy from a dark and horrific past,
there is a need for progressives, workers, educators, and
others to reclaim and advance the imperatives of a socialist
democracy defined by visions, ideals, institutions, social
relations, and pedagogies of resistance. Fundamental to
such a call is the formation of a cultural politics that
enables the public to imagine a life beyond a capitalist
society in which racial-class-and-gender-based violence
produces endless assaults on the public and civic imagination,
mediated through the elevation of war, militarization, violent
masculinity, misogyny, and the politics of disposability
to the highest levels of power. Gangster capitalism is a
death-driven machinery that infantilizes, exploits, and
devalues human life and the planet itself.
We live in a
historical moment in which education has taken on a new
role in the age of upgraded fascism. Cultural institutions
rather than overt forces of repression have become integral
to a politics of repression and domination. This is a politics
that, paraphrasing Primo Levi, reduces social habits to
silence and attempts to make a corpse out of everyone who
does not accept the GOP’s upgraded version of fascist
politics. A colonizing culture of education, with its wide
array of indoctrination practices, has become the principle
instrument used by the right to create a culture of misinformation,
implement and expand a politics of social abandonment, and
align power and consciousness with the forces of fascism.
According to historians for peace and democracy, right-wing
culture wars are a dangerous assault on academic freedom
and democracy. They write:
The
multifaceted culture wars against education constitute attacks
how history and social studies are taught and written. They
are attempts to severely restrict or eliminate teaching
about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ issues.
They are an assault on academic freedom in higher education
and on professional autonomy and responsibility in K-12
schools. They reveal political efforts to undermine public
education in the United States on all levels.
In addition,
the current authoritarian force of irrationalism reverses
the enlightenment tendency to view citizenship as a universal
right. Instead, as G. M. Tamas argues one of fascism’s
main characteristics is its hostility to universal citizenship,
derided for its appeal to equality and human dignity. In
this new historical moment, the relationship between cultural
institutions, power and everyday life increasingly use education
to destroy the public imagination and dismantle an array
of educational institutions fundamental to democracy itself.
Given the multiple
crises that haunt the current historical conjuncture, educators
need a new language for addressing the changing contexts
and issues facing a world in which there is an unprecedented
convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political,
economic, scientific, military, and technological–that
are increasingly used to concentrate powerful and diverse
forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to
be political without being dogmatic and needs to recognize
that pedagogy is always political because it is connected
to the struggle over agency. In this instance, making the
pedagogical more political means being vigilant about those
very “moments in which identities are being produced
and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created.”
Any viable pedagogy
of resistance needs to create the educational and pedagogical
visions and tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness
among the public; it must be capable of recognizing both
the scorched earth policies of neoliberalism and the twisted
fascist ideologies that support it. This shift in consciousness
cannot occur without pedagogical interventions that speak
to people in ways in which they can recognize themselves,
identify with the issues being addressed, and place the
privatization of their troubles in a broader systemic context.
Otherwise, there will be no shift in the far-right’s
use of violence, its language of dehumanization, and its
use of the state as an agent of force, indoctrination, and
conquest. Under gangster capitalism, convenient fictions
keep existing pillars of inequality in place, confirming
its strangulation of democracy and its normalization of
a vanishing future.
Education has
become dangerous in the age of gangster capitalism. Not
only because it is a public good, but also because it is
subject to the question of what education should accomplish
in a democracy? What is dreaded by GOP authoritarians is
the question regarding what work do educators have to do
to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions
necessary to endow young people with the capacities to think,
question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education
as essential for inspiring and energizing citizens necessary
for the existence of a robust socialist democracy. Put differently,
the danger of a liberating education lies in addressing
a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian
and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young
people to challenge authority, resist the notion that education
and training are the same thing, while redefining public
and higher education as democratic public spheres rather
than as sites of white Christian, white supremacy ideology.
What role might
education and critical pedagogy have in a society in which
the social has been individualized, emotional life collapses
into the therapeutic, and education is relegated to either
a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation or sites of state
indoctrination? It is crucial for educators and progressives
to remember that “education has always been foundational
to politics, but it is rarely understood as a site of struggle
over how identities are shaped, values are legitimated,
and the future defined.”
Education in
the broadest sense takes place not only in schools, but
permeates a range of corporate-controlled apparatuses that
extend from the digital airways to print culture. Under
the GOP reign of terror, these apparatuses have become updated
sites of apartheid pedagogy. As I have noted elsewhere,
“what is different about education today is not only
the variety of spaces in which it takes place, but also
the degree to which it has become an element of organized
irresponsibility and a prop for white supremacy, the crushing
of dissent, and a corrupt cultural and political order.”
This is clear in the policies of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis,
Texas Governor Greg Abbott and others whose attack on public
and higher education sanctions civic illiteracy, codifies
whiteness a tool of domination, and censors the past in
order to abolish the future. This is a fascist model of
education in which book burning, censorship, and the racial
cleansing of history merge with an attempt to turn public
and higher education into right-wing, white supremacist
indoctrination centers operating under the power of state
control.
At work in this
mode of fascist education are pedagogies of repression that
assault rather than educate. Such pedagogies often employ
modes of instruction that are not only wedded to white supremacist
and exclusionary practices, but are also punitive and mean-spirited
and are largely driven by regimes of memorization and conformity.
Pedagogies of repression are largely disciplinary and have
little regard for analyzing contexts, history, making knowledge
meaningful, or expanding upon what it means for students
to be critically engaged agents.
Culture as an
educational force has been poisoned and plays a key role
in normalizing fascist politics in America and around the
globe. Mass media has turned into a flame thrower of hate
and bigotry, stylized as spectacle. Alienating misery, social
atomization, the death of the social contract, the militarization
of public space, concentrations of wealth and power in the
hands of the financial and ruling elite, all fuel a fascist
politics. The signs of fascism no longer hide in the shadows.
This is especially clear as modern-day fascist politics
draws much of its energy from a culture of fear, resentment,
bigotry, political fundamentalism, and a state of mind in
which the distinction between truth and falsehoods collapses
into alternative realities.
In the age of
a resurgent fascism, it would be wise for educators and
others to be reminded of the importance of critical education,
historical memory, civic literacy, and collective resistance
as a counterweight to the current language of nativism,
ultra-nationalism, bigotry, and violence. There is an urgent
need on the part of educators and other cultural workers
to resist the erasure of history and the attack on education
by the far-right in several states. This is particularly
important at a time when America moves closer to a looming
fascist abyss as thinking becomes dangerous, language is
emptied out of any substance, politics is driven by the
financial elite, and institutions that serve the public
good begin to vanish.
At the current
moment, education is increasingly defined as an animating
space of repression, violence and weaponized as a tool of
censorship, state indoctrination, and terminal exclusion.
The examples have become too numerous to address. A short
list would raise questions about how to explain a Florida
school district banning a graphic novel version of Anne
Frank’s Diary, the firing of a Florida principal
for showing her class an image of Michelangelo’s ‘David,’
and the publishing of a textbook that removed any hint of
racism from Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her bus
seat in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. It gets worse and appears
to be updated with each passing day. For instance, Governor
Ron DeSantis in his run for the presidency wants to model
the US after Florida, what author David Pepper labels as
a laboratory of autocracy.
DeSantis has
signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the
United States, waged a war against transgender youth, roles
back policies designed to ameliorate global warming, and
claims that as president he would make the Justice Department
and FBI an instrument of presidential control. This is a
particularly revealing and frightening notion given that
his goal rests on revising the constitution, destroying
democracy and crushing all institutions and individuals
who dare to hold power accountable. The latter is clear
in his ongoing feud with Disney, his disparaging comments
regarding medical experts who oppose his anti-vax, anti-science
stance, his removal of elected officials who disagree with
him, and his war against teachers, librarians, and school
board members who reject his attack on public and higher
education. There is a decidedly anti-communist tone in the
discourse of MAGA politicians that echoes the notion that
all members of the opposition are enemies of the state and
should be destroyed, a notion never far removed from the
threat of state violence with deep roots in a violent racist
past.
DeSantis’s
embrace of an older anti-communist rhetoric was revealed
in an interview on Fox News in which the Florida governor
stated that if elected president “I will be able to
destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology
in the dustbin of history.” Destroying leftism is
code for his attack on critical education, his embrace of
censorship, and for legitimating what Margaret Sullivan
calls his “tireless campaign against supposed wokeness
(read: egalitarian portrayals or treatment of Black, gay,
and transgender people).” Disparaging alleged enemies
with cold war McCarthyism rhetoric provides DeSantis, Trump,
and other fascist politicians a legitimating cover to embrace
white supremacy in terms that James Baldwin labeled in No
Name in the Street “as a masturbatory delusion,”
one that willingly turns the promise of democracy into the
nightmare of an impending fascism. The editors of the prestigious
journal Scientific American provide an illuminating commentary
on the far-right politics that DeSantis is promoting, along
with a number of other MAGA politicians. They write:
What
Ron DeSantis has done in Florida mirrors efforts in other
states, including Texas. He is among a new class of conservative
lawmakers who speak of freedom while restricting freedom….
[He is] running for president of the United States on a
record of anti-diversity, pro-censorship, white nationalist
measures. He has targeted education, LGBTQ rights and access
to health care, and should he prevail, his anti- science
candidacy stands to harm millions of Americans. DeSantis
has banned books in school libraries, restricted teachers’
classroom discussions about diversity, prohibited high school
classes that focus on Black history and people, politicized
college curricula, limited spending on diversity programs,
ignored greenhouse gas reduction in climate change policy,
diminished reproductive rights and outlawed transgender
health care.
At the heart
of MAGA politics is not only a fear of individuals that
embrace the ideals of democracy, but also those institutions,
especially schools and other cultural apparatuses, where
people can be made into informed and critically citizens.
The current age of barbarism and the crushing of dissent
points to the need to emphasize how the cultural realm and
pedagogies of closure operate as educational and political
forces in the service of fascist politics. Under such circumstances,
educators and others must question not only what individuals
learn in society, but what they must unlearn, and what institutions
provide the conditions for them to do so. Against apartheid
pedagogies of repression and conformity—rooted in
censorship, racism, and the killing of the imagination—there
is the need for critical pedagogical practices that value
a culture of questioning, view critical agency as a fundamental
condition of public life, and reject indoctrination in favour
of the search for justice within educational spaces and
institutions that function as democratic public spheres.
An education
for empowerment that embraces itself as the practice of
freedom should provide a classroom environment that is intellectually
rigorous, imaginative, and allows students to give voice
to their experiences, aspirations, and dreams. It should
be a protective space in which students should be able to
speak, write, and act from a position of agency and informed
judgment. It should be a place where education does the
bridging work of connecting schools to the wider society,
connect the self to others, and address important social
and political issues. A pedagogy for the practice of freedom
is rooted in a broader project of a resurgent and insurrectional
democracy– one that relentlessly questions the kinds
of labour practices, and forms of production that are enacted
in public and higher education. While such a pedagogy does
not offer guarantees, it does recognize that its own position
is grounded in particular modes of authority, values, and
ethical principles that must be constantly debated for the
ways in which they both open up and close down democratic
relations, values, and identities.
A critical pedagogy
that functions as a practice freedom should provide the
conditions for students to learn how to make connections
with an increased sense of social responsibility coupled
with a sense of truth. At the heart of such an education,
one that is so dangerous to the far-right, is the fundamental
question of what role education has to play in a democracy.
At issue here is what role education should play as a crucial
institution that acknowledges the importance of providing
the conditions for shaping critical consciousness and informed
citizens. That is, recognizing that matters of agency and
the subject are the grounds of politics, and that education
is at the heart of critical literacy, learning, and the
essence of civic education—a danger, indeed, to the
far-right.
It is worth
repeating that as a practice of freedom, education rejects
the right-wing claim that education is about self-interest,
training, teaching for the test, memorization, and naked
forms of indoctrination and repression. As an empowering
practice, it is about teaching students to embrace the common
good and making young people into citizens willing to struggle
over and for a democratic society—as well as against
fascism itself. Education should educate young people to
say no, imagine what it means to live in a better world,
address systemic violence, develop a historical consciousness,
and imagine a different and more equitable future.
What becomes
clear under the current regime of gangster capitalism is
that its embrace of fascist politics functions so as to
cancel out the teaching of democratic values, impulses,
and practices of a civil society by either devaluing or
absorbing them within the logic of the market and a curriculum
rooted in censorship, book banning, and attacks on Black,
Brown, and trans students. In the face of this threat, educators
need a critical language to address these fascistic challenges
to public and higher education. But they also need to join
with other groups outside of the spheres of public and higher
education in order to create broad national and international
social movements that share a willingness to defend education
as a civic value and public good and to engage in a broader
struggle to deepen the imperatives of a socialist democracy
to come.
The poisonous
culture of fascism has become a model embraced by MAGA politicians
and it does so in the name of American patriotism. This
is more than a cause for alarm, it is a moment in which
democracy, in its most fragile state, may be eliminated.
Democracy has turned dark and speaks to a moment when educators
must address what an anti-fascist education might look like,
what it means to join with other groups to build a multi-cultural
working-class movement, and how to connect elements of critique
and hope with a vision in which a socialist democracy becomes
not only plausible but necessary. My friend, the late Howard
Zinn got it right in his insistence that hope is the willingness
“to hold out, even in times of pessimism, the possibility
of surprise.”
This
text draws upon a speech I gave at the 2023 American Educational
Research Association in Chicago, Illinois
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