From Free Life No 15, November 1991

In 1976, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis produced their Schooling in Capitalist America. In Great Britain, at least, this was a very influential neo-Marxist work. Their thesis - which already seemed daft to me - was that the main function of American education was to prevent socialist revolution by creating a passive, conformist workforce. Today, could anyone buy the idea that only state-schooling stands between capitalism and history as undertaker? The thesis simply cannot be squared with casual observation of schools in Britain, the USA, or Australia.

Economic success in such countries occurs mostly in spite of their education systems. Where they fail, in terms of shortages of skilled labour, for example, education is manifestly involved. Illiteracy, innumeracy, hooliganism, antinomianism, cultural, political and historical ignorance: all are widely apparent products of our educational arrangements. The education system often transmits indifference or even hostility to the political order, and guilt and shame about our civilisation. The perfect index of this, among so called better educated people, is cultural relativism - witness the synthetic and unhistorical breast- beating about the aborigines in Australia.

By the 1980s, though all this was often hypocritically denied, everyone had realised that it was true. The problem for neo-Marxist education theory was: What to do about it? How was one to deal with a theory whose parts no longer added up?

Some devotees wobbled around for years, trying to square facts, such as truancy and the wholesale rejection of the curriculum, with a thesis they obviously violated. Apparently, obstreperous children were 'resisting' capitalism and so on. This did not wash for long. Marxism has for years been a dying paradigm, in education as elsewhere, together with the socialism it inspired. Just as spatch-cock manipulation cannot save an economy based on the abolition of property, so auxiliary hypotheses about 'resistance', or race, or gender, or culture, cannot save neo-Marxist education theory. By the middle of the decade, the former flood of Marxian apologetics had become a feeble trickle.

Such a demise, however, had - and has - its sinister side. After all, what happened to all those Marxists - in education, sociology, the media, and so on? The answer is one that the Flews and Partingtons who have harried them so effectively over the years nevertheless fail to bring out as fully as appropriate. They have gone to the raggle-taggle hate-relations complex; and, oh dear, Bowles and Gintis, to judge from this book, went there too!

It is not that Flew and Partington did not follow and harry the Marxists in their new redoubts. They did. They did not, however, draw sufficient attention to the transition. Marxism will probably perish in these new redoubts too. What, however, if the enemies of our society regroup in their latest fastnesses and come up with some novel and more menacing, less raggle-taggle theory? I have been wondering about this for more than a decade. Perhaps Democracy and Capitalism belongs to a first wave of attempts by former Marxists at a major rethink of the socialist prospectus.

Has it been or will it be effective? Intellectually, it does not give much cause for alarm, though one can think of many people in England and Australia whom it has outraged with its off-handed abandoning of treasured positions. It has not received much notice, and it must be admitted that to try to break new ground when radical socialism is falling apart is obviously difficult. In terms of its authors' previous opinions, however, the new work involves a breath-taking theoretical insouciance and didactic impertinence. It breaks airily with the crude neo-Althusserian grind of a decade ago: "We will not propose the superiority of planning... or of the Marxian economic categories". Moreover, the base- superstructure model which Bowles and Gintis learned from Marx and Althusser, and which was the very fulcrum of Schooling in Capitalist America, is quite unceremoniously dumped. From now on, Marxism is to be nothing more than an important strand in a rethought radicalism.

Even more 'radical' is the precise moment (in reference 4 to Chapter 6) when they formally jettison 'false consciousness'. Given the mountains of statistics their earlier book devoted to mensurating this alleged human predicament, it is perhaps a matter of empirical decency that the new book contains nothing of evidential substance.

Bowles and Gintis now insist on the primacy of politics and action. Their aim is the furtherance and strengthening of personal rights. The capitalist economy is still identified as the major obstacle to rights, and it will have to go if they are to obtain: "The beleaguered realm is the capitalist economy itself". Structural analysis, however, is demoted. The authors invoke no theory of history, suggest no patterned, immanent developmental process as a vehicle for the enactment of such rights. This is a drastic change, one which in spirit moves in the opposite direction to their erstwhile Marxism, that is back from depersonalised, unfolding structure to an ahistorical and romanticised personalism. Bowles and Gintis now admit that "we find labour and production a restrictive conceptual grid". This turnabout is roughly on a par with what a Darwinist would be saying if he formally abandoned natural selection.

In Democracy and Capitalism, the property-war is replaced by a war for rights: the clash between proletariat and capital gives way to a conflict between democracy and capitalism. Democracy, however, is conceived in terms of the contemporary rights afflatus; and here the destructive sentimentality and implacable rage of the latter are hidden behind our authors' elegant prose. One does not regret the passing of the base- superstructure metaphor, a deadly conceit which nullifies law and politics. Nor need we mourn false consciousness, that condescending dismissal of ordinary people's competence. Only when we ask who is to do the defining of rights and priorities do we see that the same game continues - the old socialist power-chase: the rule of the intellectuals. But the false, tight schema of yesteryear has yielded to an amorphous rightsology with no central structure that can be refuted. It consists rather in a set of moralising obsessions arbitrarily gummed together within a curious metaphysic of action, in which becoming is everything and actual outcomes a matter of indifference. This strange ontology is sometimes pompously masqueraded as a version of Marcuse or even Hegel. Its true affinity is with the sloppy 'process model' of teaching whihc has ruined so many of our primary schools. It is the ideology of universal, 'caring' committeedom.

In some ways, though, the book has spelt out ideas which were always implicit in neo-Marxism. Classical Marxism was about abolishing politics as a sham and a fraud. Neo-Marxism, in direct contrast, has seen politics as ubiquitous and attempted to subvert and refashion it. In both cases, the practical implication has been a very marked increase in bureaucratic power. In communist societies, a hypertrophied state seeks to suppress capitalism and 'plan its alternatives. In the open societies, swellen, publicly funded bodies seek to pursue various obsessions defined as 'political' issues - eg, in race, culture and gender: to impose the new orthodoxies: and, worst of all, to punish infractors.

The authors maintain that personal rights are more important to people's self-development than property rights - indeed, that the two collide. The eighteenth century Rights of Man, it seems, have become our contemporary civil rights movement, feminism and the 'right' to a job. Their chosen trio here shows that they do not know about category errors. The rights of non-whites and women are disputable. It is not clear that they are separate from human rights in general; and the philosophic basis of human rights is itself contentious. But at least the debate touches on universality. The 'right' to a job, by contrast, can never be more than an administered or legislated convention, unworkable outside a highly developed economy.

Property and person are seen here as two opposing logics within the liberal capitalist order. From the truth that the emerging democratic franchise of the last three centuries has involved shifting patterns of conflict and accommodation amongst the social strata, our authors derive the false proposition, that property (capitalism) and personal autonomy (democracy) are in fixed and irreconcilable conflict. This is bad history and bad political and economic sociology. The ferment which developed from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution involved individual rights and economic growth, in a symbiosis, as writers such as Rostow have shown. While the exact connections between capitalism and freedom are harder to specify than, say, a Milton Friedman of Arthur Seldon will allow, there is now doubt that a fundamental etiological bonding unites them, as does a broad functional compatibility. Moreover, just as intellectual reflection was integral to economic modernisation, so modern affluence is indispensible for the luxuriating contemporary indulgence of the preoccupation with 'rights'.

What is, furthermore, especially bad for the thesis here presented is that the socialism which still lurks unexplicated in the book's interstices has always in practice meant a morally and politically inferior way of life, quite apart from its disastrous economic short-comings.

Readers must make what they will of the contention that 'Post- Liberal' democracy was doomed, despite the material successes of capitalism, because of its failure to think in terms of community - ie, collectively. Bowles and Gintis claim that liberalism had the individual priorities correct, and Marxism the the collective 'action' priorities; and that somehow they must be brought together. This seems to me to carry the retrospective implication that Lenin, Stalin and Mao would have been all right had they only read this book.

Like most socialists, the authors are very confused about market rationality. If businessmen are profit maximisers, it ought to follow that, say, white and black or male and female differentials in the long run reflect not convention or prejudice but variations in productivity. If they are functions of bigotry, then the capitalist system is not profit maximising. The authors describe casuistical loops around this problem without getting to grips with it.

They themselves are in the grip of the 'anti-sexist' mania. They attack capitalist society for its patriarchy. They link this to the view that labour markets do not diminish discrimination against women. Both contentions, I think, are wrong. Women are not subordinated in the family in our sort of society. Indeed, the law is running the opposite way: witness in our own country, for example, the recent House of Lords ruling against marital rape, or the gradual equalising of income tax allowances. As for the labour market, we can see the differences melting before our very eyes. It is the welfare merchants and poverty pimps who keep women and non- white people poor in the advanced economies, forcing them into an endless cycle of dependency. Most other types of society have been much worse than ours in terms of the tretment of women and of relations between different races. Modern socialism has often exacerbated racial prejudice, and even its claim to have advanced the interests of women needs to be set against its lack of a citzenry, male or female.

Recoiling (rightly) from economic reductionism, Bowles and Gintis now give us political reductionism. They plump for politics everywhere, as in their choice little hymn to participatory democracy:

There you have it. People must not work to better themselves, to leave their slums or rotten schools. Rather, they must join some local committee. The poor and blacks need 'voice', not cash in their pockets. What does this leave room for, but the ascendency of the welfare- expertocracy?

the book is a kind of angst-exhortation manual for corrupted local government, the welfare-syndicalist nexus, and the poorer kind of higher education institution - absolutely perfect, for example, for one of our polytechnics. Everyone sits on committees moaning about 'rights' and 'principles', as the various sub-Marxist shibboleths are called. Nothing of any intellectual worth gets said, and problems are created, not solved. Meanwhile, a closed, explicit ideology is bit by bit imposed, and a deadening conformism spread. Everything is to be controlled - as the authors at one point do admit. 'Democratic' accountability, to give a single instance, may entail the prevention of capital flight - or, to put abstractions into plain English, the forbidding of people to protect the value of their savings. Morality aside, it is hard to imagine a policy more perfectly conceived for slump-making.

It is appropriate that this incorrigibly perverse book shoul;d end with a quotation from Schumpeter - a man for all his genius totally wrong about the prospects for capitalism. Bowles and Gintis agree with him that capitalism is doomed, practically irrelevant and intellectually indefensible. What was that again about neither holy, nor Roman, nor empire?

Dennis J. O'Keeffe