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Poverty, Education, and the Sublation of Postdigital Capitalism

Tue, April 21, 10:35am to 12:05pm, Virtual Room

Abstract

There is a long legacy in capitalist America to individualize social phenomena such as poverty. With the working-class highly organized and increasingly militant after WWII, educational historian Michael Katz (1989) wonders if the vast war on poverty initiatives of this era were driven by a genuine “compassion for the poor, or the need to win black votes and quell the riots in America’s cities” (p. 81). After the suppression of the workers’ and peoples’ movements and emerging economic revolutions in production, the US shifted from waging a war on poverty to a war on the poor. While the war on poverty viewed poverty as the result of the deficit of individuals, it was viewed as something that could be overcome through state intervention in education.
The war on the poor shifted from a focus on combating poverty through state intervention to arguing that individual’s adopting a better attitude was the path to social mobility. It is within this context that scholars and policy makers began arguing that the reason why ‘disadvantaged’ youth have lower higher education rates is a lack of aspiration. Researchers have found that there is no significant difference in aspiration across the social strata. What researchers have found is that youth across differences have similar aspirations but different expectations (Harrison & Waller 2018). The focus on education to combat poverty is based on the mainstream human capital theory assumption that increasing educational attainment promotes economic growth. However, this has been shown to be a false relationship as researchers have consistently found that the economy determines the educational needs of labor, not the other way around (Means 2017).
Other researchers, coming from an autonomous Marxist perspective, have argued that the rise in immaterial labor and digitalization is opening up limitless opportunities for economic growth that will eliminate poverty (Negri 1991). Foley (2013) argues that these utopian visions of a poverty-free capitalism suffer from the failure to distinguish between the appropriation of already produced value and the production of new value.
This paper argues that sabotaging the machine or attempting to resist digitalization is not going to stop the rising tide of poverty. This paper argues that sublating the digitized capitalist system into some sort of digitized socialism is the only way to combat poverty. Since teachers have seem to taken the lead of the labor movement in the US, the paper looks at the postdigital contours of the current wave of teacher rebellions for insights regarding sublation. The scholarly significance of this paper lies not only in its calls for sublation, but for insights regarding this complex and still opaque process that can be gleaned by the recent work actions of teachers.

References

Foley, D. (2013). Rethinking Financial Capitalism and the “Information” Economy. Review of Radical Political Economics, 45(3), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613413487154
Means, A. (2017). Education for a Post-work Future: Automation, Precarity, and Stagnation. Knowledge Cultures, 5(1), 21-40.
Negri, A. (1991). Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. New York: Autonomedia/Pluto.

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