Abstract
In this chapter we aim to chart the existing courses of opposition to neo-liberalism, and to suggest the themes and focuses of a productive future strategy. Any such discussion must take into account neo-liberalism’s achievements, which are, in the first instance, not political or ideological but economic and social. Through neo-liberalism, technologies and social relations have been reorganised and social classes recomposed. In a capitalism described by Castells as ‘informational’ in character, labour has bifurcated: at one end of the market, demand for low-skilled labour has expanded; in other sectors, labour has become to a greater extent immaterial, cognitive, linguistic — at the same time as it is required to be flexible, self-renewing and accustomed (through debt, job insecurity, the under-provision of welfare and pensions) to a greater level of risk and precarity.1 In these changed landscapes — which are always landscapes of polarisation — education occupies a new and larger place — a site where capital is accumulated, social problems managed and skills and dispositions are produced more intensively and extensively than in earlier periods.
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Notes
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© 2008 Ken Jones, Chomin Cunchillos, Richard Hatcher, Nico Hirtt, Rosalind Innes, Samuel Johsua and Jürgen Klausenitzer on behalf of the Colectivo Baltasar Gracián
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Jones, K. et al. (2008). Unconcluded. In: Schooling in Western Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230579934_10
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