The war on the social state is in high gear and is most evident in a range of polices designed to punish unions, abrogate the bargaining rights of workers, cut social protections and disinvest in higher education as a site of critical learning while reorganizing it according to the interests and values of a market-driven culture.
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As the rich and powerful rewrite the script of politics, they are largely assisted by a number of Republican governors are not only breaking the backs of labor unions but are also firing police officers and fire fighters, curtailing benefits for the unemployed, denying poor people access to health services and “cutting medical, rehabilitative, home care or other services needed by low-income people who are elderly or have disabilities or are significantly increasing the cost of these services.” As social problems are privatized and public spaces commodified, there has been an increased emphasis on individual solutions to socially produced problems, while at the same time market relations and the commanding institutions of capital are divorced from matters of politics, ethics and responsibility. How else to explain the lack of massive protests over the recent revelations that mega-corporations such as General Electric and the Bank of America paid no taxes in spite of accruing massive financial profits. The commodification of thought and the depoliticization of everyday life have created both a culture of illiteracy and cruelty in which notions of the public good, community and the obligations of citizenship are replaced by the overburdened demands of individual responsibility and an utterly privatized ideal of freedom.
Henry Giroux. Militarized Conservatism and the End(s) of Higher Education.
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