Totalitarian Capitalism? A Novel Form of Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Democracy, Hegemony, and Totalitarianism: An Educational Study

Abstract

A text based analysis, this paper investigates the ways in which contemporary public intellectuals and educational scholars have begun to use the term totalitarian (capitalism) to describe the United States and its schools. I frame this study with Arendt’s (1951/1973) analysis of totalitarianism as a “novel form of government” (p. 460) characterized by “an iron band of terror” (p. 466) that destroys freedom and life itself and Marcuse’s (1964) contention that totalitarianism does not have to be a particular kind of government but can also take the form of “a non-terroristic economic-technical” (p. 3) society. More specifically, I will raise questions concerning the viability of the ways this term is being used in current literature given that capitalism cannot be totalitarian as it is aneconomic, anti-utilitarian, and antipolitical, at least according to the authoritative text on the subject, The Origins of Totalitarianism
In a recent op-ed, journalist Chris Hedges (2010) states prophetically that “[t]here are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism…The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying.” Indeed, virtually all aspects of what once symbolized American life are eroding. The political and legal systems are now under the vise of corporate control and the right to protest as a right to free speech and assembly is being thwarted by an ever more powerful security apparatus. This new “age of totalitarian capitalism,” Hedges add, scapegoats the weak, directing attention away from “corporate vampires” and, I would also add, the government itself which has turned the tables on whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, charging him with espionage for exposing the United States’ vast spying system. Such an indictment is beyond ironic; it is a hallmark of “totalitarian propaganda [which] can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity” (Arendt, 1951/1973, p. 352).
In educational scholarship, too, Hill (2004) explains how a “capitalist agenda” (p. 175) increasingly subordinates and reconfigures education as a tool to maximize profit; Vinson and Ross (2007) point out how standards-based education reform is not only a system of spectacle but one of surveillance, forecasting that which Snowden recently unveiled to the world about what is now being called by some the “United Stasi of America” (Hawley, 2013); going a step further, Pinar (2012) describes computerized and standardized test-driven American schools not only in capitalistic terms but totalitarian ones, as they increasingly obliterate the human condition of plurality: “the secret site of totalitarianism in America today is hidden right out in the open. It is the school” (p. 53). While this might (not) be the case, it my position and purpose here to, first, describe the in/distinct term totalitarianism in order to gain conceptual clarity on its meaning and with the help of its greatest thinkers and, second, to recognize, as Young-Bruehl (2006) does, that it is im/possible to judge how present and/or future versions of totalitarianism might present themselves in their infancy (p. 35) based on how they appeared in previous incarnations.

Author

• Hannah Marie Spector, Pennsylvania State University - Harrisburg