The university students I teach are the first children of the global market regime. They all have been conditioned to understand their education as a means to more money for themselves. Cogito ergo sum has become; I am the money that can become more money by getting my degree.
In this squalid market ethic, rising tuition fees are costs of investment in "human capital", while money capital is the meaning of life. Thus we see corporate globalization increasingly constructing the minds of the next generation as consumer and sales functions on the demand end, and obedient labour and service mechanisms on the supply end — all for stockholders to extract more money returns to themselves at the top of the feeding cycle. There is no remainder in the value system.
Corporate domination of society over recent decades has proven its danger to all forms of education. The quest for wider and deeper understanding by humanity's inherited codes of meaning has been systemically sacrificed to mindless market opportunism. In and out of the classroom, students are relentlessly indoctrinated to fit as temporary functions for global corporate money sequences. Their minds and bodies are cumulatively degraded in the process. In the world's leading market, the vocabulary of youth has been halved since commercial television came on line, obesity from corporate junk food has multiplied across age groups to over 40% of the population, and most find it difficult to comprehend more than a few sentences of prose at a time.
Conditioned by the global market's system — selectors to be passive and predictable reactors to corporate stimuli flooding their environment with unconnected images and messages to "buy", the young have been dumbed down towards the lowest common denominator of mass appetite without thought. The telemarketing of unneeded commodities then replaces the vocation of serving others as the meaning of their graduation. Social learning is simultaneously foreclosed because there is no critical feedback loop in this self-referential value calculus. Turning money into more money for money investors is "the end of history".
Real Value vs. Money Value
Neoclassical economics is at the heart of the problem because it can recognise no ground of value other than monetized capital, the God of all value. As with Yaheweh in the past, only in idolatrous form, any other source of value is the Enemy and to be abhorred. Yet if we consider the meaning of capital more carefully, we discover a home truth that has been lost for an era. Deriving its meaning from the original root of "cattle" — the wealth of milk, meat and energy that reproduces and grows into more if not consumed — "capital" has a deeper meaning than we suppose. At bottom, it means life wealth that is used to produce more life wealth.
Money capital, in contrast, is not really wealth or capital at all, but money control of wealth. What the premises of market culture fatefully miss is that money does not designate value, but only its possessor's demand on value. Money capital, in fact, never increases wealth, but only claims on wealth by those who control it. On the other hand, life capital is real capital. As the means of life that produce more means of life, it is the real basis of every breath we take and morsel we eat — what serves life as a means of life to become more comprehensive life. All value, in the end, is life value, and all real capital enables more life, not more money.
Life capital has two major forms — natural capital and human capital. Both are being increasingly degraded by money capital absolutism. The global market system cumulatively toxifies and strips social and ecological life-organisation to multiply the money-demand of private stockholders, but no problem registers to this value calculus because it has no life co-ordinates.
Human capital in the undistorted sense is sound education, what causes society's store and bearers of human knowledge to reproduce and grow. No operation of the real economy can occur without the learned capabilities education produces and develops from one generation to the next. Yet within the closed box of money capital — money becoming more money for money possessors — neither human nor natural capital counts for any value except as each serves this hungry-ghost money sequence. The world of value is thus turned upside down. Means of life to produce more means of life otherwise in scarce supply, the true meaning of an economy, are used only to return more money to those who control money. In consequence, the earth and the human species itself face the greatest crisis of economic misrule in history.
Seeing Through Money-Capital Fetishism
Canada's long-serving Minister of Finance recently declared to an environmental audience that natural and human capital — the primary forms of life capital — must be "protected", and went on to assert that this was all part of "a revolution in the structure of our economy in the mindset of our people". So far, one might think Paul Martin got it right. But the words were hardly out of his mouth when he contradicted the meaning of what he said by adding that this "revolution" began with his halving of the government deficit-to-GDP ratio in the 1990's!
The contradiction is blatant. The deficit was paid down by Martin's reduction of health, education and social assistance transfers to provinces by $24 billion in one year, and by halving of the environmental budget — even though these investments in human and natural capital accounted for only 6% of the deficit growth by a multi-refereed study of his own Ministry. Martin's policies were, in fact, a massive assault on human and natural capital masquerading as "necessary for the economy". Meanwhile, public investment in human capital still remains completely excluded from public accounts as capital investment. At the same time, the government of Canada is on a trade-deal binge to open all education budgets across the world to corporate for-profit management — over $2, 000,000,000, 000 in what DFAIT calls "procurement opportunities". This is the secret meaning of NAFTA "trade in services" and the WTO's GATS negotiations.
The key to every society's defence of educational heritage is to understand that "human capital" is not an ancillary function to serve money capital and corporate profit. No more fatal error could mislead humanity. True human capital is the opposite. It means ever-greater wealth of human life capabilities being built and passed from one generation to the next. The global corporate market is bringing us the reverse — ever more reckless depredation of life capital to enrich decoupled financial circuits. Looted environments and hollowed education systems are the result. This is money capital in its carcinogenic stage.
The Life Capital Turn
The movement to understanding capital as more than the reified subsystem of money capital is centuries old. Jane Austen's male characters were typed as so many pounds per year, the heyday of money-fetish capital. But this problem is many times more destructive today. Other kinds of capital are finally being recognised — human, natural and social capital — but all remain subjugated to money capital. Do not underestimate the theocratic fundamentalism at work here.
Consider the National Science Organization Working Group which is now planning a country-wide research authority, a National Academy for Canada. It seems a fine idea. But the problem is that the administrative mover of the proposal is Dr. Tom Brzustowski who is on record as saying as former Ontario Deputy Minister of Education: "I contend that the one global object of education must be to create wealth [sic]- - to export products in which our knowledge and skills provide the value added, to develop new services which we can offer for trade in the world market".
"Human capital" here is understood as investment of money into education so that students turn into producers of net higher money revenues for business markets. This "value adding" property qualifies the bearers of this sequence as "human capital" because they too are transformed into money sequences producing more money value for private investors than what their training costs. This is money-capital fetishism. On the basis of its upside-down logic, education is the middle term between money inputs and more money outputs. The "growth" of aggregate monetised outputs is its doctrine of salvation. But its profit has become the deficit of the earth and its culture the inversion of education.
A cultural insanity continues only so long as it is unrecognised. If money capital is not used to create means of life, as it increasingly does not, it is dead capital. It is demand on life that consumes and predates it with no return. This is what we should learn from any education worthy of the name.
John McMurtry's Value Wars will be published by Pluto Press, London, in 2002.