![]() Cultural institutions rather than overt forces of repression have become integral to a politics of repression and domination. We live in a historical moment in which education has taken on a new role in the age of upgraded fascism. Gangster capitalism is a death-driven machinery that infantilizes, exploits, and devalues human life and the planet itself. 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. 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.Īgainst 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. Market mentalities, a politics of racial cleansing, and a politics of social and historical amnesia increasingly tighten their grip on all aspects of society. Under such circumstances, the ghosts of fascism are once again on the march. ![]() 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. As an educational project, it trades in moral blindness, historical amnesia, and racial and class hatred. It is a politics of subjugation and denial, relentlessly aiming for a public that internalizes its own oppression as second nature. Gangster capitalism thrives on the silence of the oppressed and the complicity of those seduced by its power. 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. 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. 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. ![]() Īs 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Capitalism has always been constructed on the basis of organized violence.
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