Education and Profit

New England textile mill workers, mostly young, formally uneducated women, wise beyond their circumstances, understood, at the advent of industrial capitalism in America, something that most of us have forgotten. Capitalism is inimical to human relations; it stands necessarily opposed to all that is good and true about human social existence.

They understood that the pattern of social and economic relations we call capitalism were something less than human, that profit-seeking had no end, and that the foundations of human sociality were threatened by capitalism's triumph.

The trend toward privatization -- which is mere cover for corporate domination -- in this country continues unabated and is accelerating. All that makes human life distinctive, true and good is fundamentally inimical to capitalism, and everywhere under assault by corporate dominance. Art, education, medicine, governance, public information, and criminal justice are some of these things, none of which may be done well or truly when subordinated -- as they must necessarily be -- to profit-seeking.

Most world cultures understand that some things ought not be subordinated to commerce, which is a necessary aspect of human sociality, but a rapacious aspect, one which cannot, when given centrality, be satisfied in principle. Much of the sickness of American culture stems from the now century-long assault on public space, which dramatically intensified after WWII. Everything that can be corporatized has either already been or is presently so threatened: education, medicine, government, social services, criminal justice and penal rehabilitation, etc. In sector after sector for-profit behemoths take over the public administration of vital human concerns; and those public institutions which remain, particularly in education and medicine, are increasingly pressured to match their for-profit rivals in coarse and crass commerciality.

What is under attack here is nothing short of human sociality itself, without which none of us can be who we are. Without a robust and vital public space, we humans inevitably become less than human. We become mere consumers of our own commodification.