What Neoliberal Global and National Capi PDF

From “Hill, D.
(2007) What Neoliberal Global and National Capitals Are Doing to Education Workers
and to Equality: Some Implications for Social Class Analysis. In A. Green and G. Rikowski (eds.)
Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues: London: Palgrave Macmillan”
Chapter 4:
What Neoliberal Global and National
Capitals Are Doing to Education
Workers and to Equality—Some
implications for Social Class Analysis

D a v e H i l l

Introduction: Education, Neoliberalism, and Class War from Above
Education is being neoliberalized globally. Privatization, deregulation, decentralization, reduction in
public social, welfare and educational spending, the shift in the tax burden from rich to poor, from
the middle and upper classes to the working classes, all disproportionately affect the working class.
Neoliberalization of education has five major effects. These are the
1. increases in inequalities both within and between states;

2. reduction in the quality and standards of schooling and higher education overall for working-
class populations;
3. assault on democracy;
4. suppression and compression of critical space in education (and other state apparatuses (see
Hill, 2001, 2005b, 2007b); and decrease in education workers’ pay, rights, and conditions
(see Hill, 2005a, 2006a, 2007a).
Academic labour itself is becoming both more proletarianized and more straightjacketed into
increased subservience to the interests of capital (see Hill, 2001, 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2007a, 2007b).
In this chapter, I attempt to argue from a classical Marxist analysis, the continued salience of social
class in terms of it being the essential and the major victim of neoliberalism and of intensified
capitalist exploitation. I address three aspects of class denial in the media and schooling ideological
state apparatuses, and in the work of conservative, postrnodernist, and some Left academics
(“revisionist Left” or “Left liberal”) such as Michael W. Apple. These analyses variously hide or deny
the class nature of capitalism, or, in Apple’s case, relegate class to just one form of structural
exploitation, with equivalence to race and gender exploitation/oppression.
First, the working class is not dead in objective terms—the number of wage labourers globally is
growing. Second it is the working class that is being damaged most by neoliberal policies by attacks
on “the social wage” and by fiscal policy—the increasing tax on workers and decreasing tax on
business and the rich in a policy of educational and social/economic triage. Third—and this is
connected—workers’ pay, rights, and conditions of employment—and the rights, powers, and the
organizing/negotiating ability of trade unions are also under systematic attack from neoliberal
2 Dave Hill
policies. These policies comprise an intensified “class war from above” (Dumenil and Levy, 2004;
Harvey, 2005).
In this discussion of class, I recognize the internally differentiated nature of social class; argue the
necessity of developing class consciousness—a necessary state of mind for engaging in a successful
socialist transformation of capitalist economy, society and politics; and assert the necessity of the
leading role of the working class and its organizations in the global anticapitalist struggle. I conclude
that such a Marxist analysis is necessary both theoretically and organizationally if capital is to be
radically transformed.
Part One: Social Class Analysis

The Objective Salience of Social Class
Academic and media arguments that “class is dead,” or, if not dead, is declining relative to preceding
periods in capitalist development, are common. It is commonly suggested that this “disappearance”
of class has occurred in objective terms; that “fast capitalism” (Agger, 1989) has transmogrified the
working class into a service, hitech, increasingly self-employed and/or embourgeoisified workforce.
T h e C a p i t a l i s t C l a s s K n o w s I t I s a C l a s s

It is interesting, and rarely remarked upon, that similar arguments are not advanced regarding the
disappearance of class signifiers and identifiers among the capitalist class. They appear to know very
well who they are. Nobody is denying capitalist class consciousness.
The “class struggle from above” is relatively invisible to many outside the Marxist tradition. There is
a general failure to recognize the class nature of antiunion legislation, changes to the taxation
system, privatization of public and of welfare services. Combined with the decline of visible
resistance/”class war from below” in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK, following the defeat of Great
Miners’ Strike in 1985, this led many commentators to announce, etimes rather hopefully, the end
of class society. Pakulski and Waters (1996) argue that (working class) consciousness and the
motivation/desire recognition of “class war” and class struggle have (largely) disappeared.
This Pakulski argues,
The key assumption of class analysis—that all important social conflicts have a class
basis and class character because class represents the key social dimension or
modern (capitalist) society—does not withstand critical scrutiny. (1995: 75)
I now want to argue against the three major forms of arguments that social class is either dead or
diminishing in importance as the essential and salient objective structural cleavage in capitalist
society.
First, I want to make some comments about postmodern analysis of class. Second, to refer to
analyses that we now live in a hitech, service industry, industrialized world, where anticapitalist
struggle is now focused on and - social movements.” Third, about the work of Left theorists such as
Apple who assert, inter alia, the equivalence of “race,” class, and gender as forms of cession under
capitalism, refuting the salience of class as the essential form of exploitation in capitalist society.2
3 IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL CLASS ANALYSIS
P o s t m o d e r n A n a l y s i s

Together with others (e.g., Cole and Hill, 1995, 2002; Cole, Hill, and Rikowski, 1997; Hill and Cole,
2001; Hill et al., 2002. See also Allman et al., OO5; Cole, 2007), I have argued against the
postmodernist analysis that an appreciation of multiple subjectivities necessarily negates the
salience of class a form of structural analysis, and as the necessary center of anticapitalist resistance.
Some critical or “resistance” postmodernists fear that “multiple ii.ces” will be lost or oppressed in
communities or in mass movements and have therefore suggested that the most that might be
hoped for is a gathering of voices within increasingly small and homogenous groups. Beyer and
Liston contest such analyses:
personal and social conditions need to be continually created, recreated, and

reinforced that will encourage, respect, and value expressions of difference. Yet if the
valorization of otherness precludes the search for some common good that can
engender solidarity even while it recognizes and respects that difference, we will be
left with a cacophony of voices that disallow political and social action that is morally
compelling. If a concern for otherness precludes community in any form, how can
political action be undertaken, aimed at establishing a common good that disarms
patriarchy, racism and social class oppression? What difference can difference then
make in the public space? (1992: 380—381)
S o c i a l M o v e m e n t s

Similar, though not identical, arguments are advanced by some representatives of the “social
movements” concerning the demise—or at least, the demise in importance (for the anticapitalist
project)—of class and of class-based movements such as trade unions. For example, the debate at
the (2004) World Social Forum between Chris Harman and Antonio Negri (Harman, 2002) stated
both positions clearly. Harman’s salient points against Hardt and Negri’s (2001) conception of
“multitude” as a category to replace “class” are set out below in the discussion on the size of the
working class and an assessment of changes in its internal differentiation.
L e f t L i b e r a l s / R e v i s i o n i s t L e f t i s t s S u c h A s M i c h a e l W A p p l e

A third source of attack on class analysis comes from perspectives, such as that of Apple. Apple
attacks, though sometimes specific personalities Marxists such as Peter McLaren, and writers within
what some describe as “the British Marxists” for having an outmoded class analysis, rooted in the
age of the white, male (indeed, masculinist) industrial worker—the proletariat. He depicts class
analysts as people who have learned nothing since the reproductionist Marxists of the 1970s such as
Bowles and Gintis and Louis Althusser. (See, e.g., Apple 2005a, 2005b, 2006a, 2006b.) For example,
in his 2005 American Education Research Association (AERA) speech, Apple (2005b) attacked
Marxists who have returned to a two-class model, citing “my good friend Eric Olin Wright. . . we
should use Erik Olin Wright” instead of “outmoded models.”3
While detailed sophisticated classificational analysis of social class into multiple categories can be
useful, it has a number of drawbacks—which have a theoretical as well as a political dimension.
I want to make a fourfold criticism of Apple’s position. These relate to

4 Dave Hill
1. his analysis of social class classification;

2. his “triptych” race, class, gender model of equivalence;
3. his relative autonomist, antireproductionism critique of some contemporary Marxist
thought; and
4. the implications of Apple’s analysis for political organization and action.
S o c i a l C l a s s C l a s s i f i c a t i o n

First, let us look into the complex (whether from the Left or the Right) models of class, where there
are 6 class, or 16 class or 66 class categorizations are based on Weberian notions of class, which are
based on patterns of consumption rather than relationship to the means of production.
Social class analysts who are Marxist, such as Erik Olin Wright (e.g., 1985, 2005; Wright et al., 2001),
theorize strata in the class structure, in particular those in “contradictory class locations” (middle or
junior managers, and workers with some autonomy over their working conditions such as doctors,
university lecturers). Complex models of categorization, whether from a Weberian
consumerist/lifestyle categorization, or whether from an attempt such as Wright’s at Marxist
analysis (of combinations of relationships to the means of productions, and the social relations of
production) customarily perform a number of disabling functions for class analysis and subsequent
political project and political organisation.
First, they hide the capitalist class as a class. Nowhere in the lists of classified strata or “classes”
appears the capitalist class. Second, they hide the working class as a class, they segment the
commonality and objective unity of the working class in itself. These distinctions of/between layers,
or strata propagate and present a picture of a fragmented working class with divergent interests.
Third, they thus work to fragment working-class solidarity, class consciousness, and its sense of
solidarity, of social and political cohesion. They impede class consciousness. As such, they hide the
class struggle.
They erase both the proletariat and the capitalist classes as antagonistic entities unified in the
contradictory and exploitative social (property) relations of capitalist production (Hill, 1999; see also
Hill and Cole, 2001; Kelsh, 2001; Rikowski, 2001; McLaren and Scatamburlo d’Annibale, 2004;
McLaren and Jaramillo, 2006). Paula Allman, Glenn Rikowski, and Peter McLaren (2005) also critique
the various types of complex and sophisticated and in some ways useful)4 “Box People”
classifications—putting people in what could, in an orgy of sophistication, result in endless
subclassification. The trouble is, you can get so sophisticated, and so focussed on the micro that you
cannot see the wood from the trees or a way though the orchard.
R a c e d a n d Ge n d e r e d S o c i a l C l a s s

Apple criticises class analysts for ignoring race, gender, and sexuality. He suggests that we need a
much more nuanced and complex picture of class relations and class projects to understand what is
happening in relation to “racial dynamics” as well as those involving gender (e.g., Apple, 2005a: 392,
2006a: 116). In this, Apple presupposes that the Marxist theory of class cannot address differences
such as those of race and gender—essentially, that it can address only the “economic.” He has, for a
long time, asserted, inter alia, the equivalence of race, class, and gender as forms of oppression
under capitalism, refuting the salience of class as the essential form of exploitation in capitalist
society.
Apple accuses traditional Marxists of class reductionism, a view in which all the features of human
social experience are reducible to the class division in society, where everything can be explained by
its function for the reproduction of capital, ignoring the specificities of that oppression such as that
based on gender or race. Apple’s accusation is that classical Marxists “privilege” class and
marginalize race, gender, and sexuality. But the concept of class, the existence of class, the
awareness of class are themselves sometimes buried beneath, hidden by, suffocated, displaced in
the work of Michael W Apple.
Martha Gimenez (2001: 24) succinctly explains that “class is not simply another ideology legitimating
oppression.” Rather, class denotes “exploitative relations between people mediated by their
relations to the means of production.” While Apple’s “parallellist,” or equivalence model of
exploitation (equivalence of exploitation based on race, class, and gender, his tryptarchic model of
inequality produces valuable data and insights into aspects of gender oppression and race
oppression in capitalist United States; however, such analyses serve, as Gimenez (and Kelsh and Hill,
2006) suggest, to occlude the class-capital relation, the class struggle, to obscure an essential and
defining nature of capitalism, class conflict.
Marxists recognize that class is raced and gendered and characterized by other forms of personal,
institutional, and structural discrimination and oppression. Many Marxists have sought to argue this
since the white male- dominated Marxism of the Stalinist era and the Third International of the
1950s. In my own work with Rikowski, McLaren, and Cole (e.g., Cole et al., 2001; McLaren et al.,
2001; Hill et al., 2002; see also Smith, 2007) we take great pains to recognize and combat both in
writing and in political action, the current ferocity and historical nature of race and gender
oppression and discrimination based on sexuality and disability.
With respect to one aspect of structural inequalities reproduced within the education system in
England and Wales, in terms of educational achievement, Gillborn and Mirza (2000) show very
clearly that it is the difference between social classes in attainment that is the fundamental and
stark feature of the education system in England and Wales.
In their analysis of attainment inequalities by class, race, and gender for the years 1988—1997, 5 or
more higher grade General Certificates of Education (GCSEs—the exam usually taken at age 16 in
England and Wales relative to the national average), the gender difference between girls and boys is
half that relating to race (comparing white students with African Caribbean). This in turn is less than
half of the social class difference—the difference between children of managerial professional
parentage on the one hand, and children from unskilled manual working-class homes (Gillborn and
Mirza, 2000: 22).
There is a specific race factor involved. Dehal (2006) points out that the impact of economic
disadvantage does differ significantly across BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) groups. He concludes
that “economic disadvantage is the key driver of ethnic disparity.” He notes that the ethnic groups of
poor children—(again, as defined as those receiving free school meals)—performing least well are,
respectively, starting with the lowest attainers of ethnic groups, the Gypsy Roma/Travellers, then
the white British, then white and black Caribbean, and then the black Caribbean. In contrast, poor
6 Dave Hill
children from the Chinese, Indian, and Bangladeshi ethnic groups achieve the highest attainment
results, with the poor Chinese children the highest achieving ethnic group of all (as denoted by 5 or
more Grade C to Grade A* at the GCSE exam stage, at around age 16) of all poor children, and Gypsy
Roma/ Traveller, and white British poor children the lowest attainers of all children in poverty.
Thus, Dehal’s conclusion, based on empirical data collected for the period 2003—2005, confirms
that of Gillborn and Mirza (2000). There is a specific race factor involved—some ethnic groups of
15—16-year-olds in receipt of free school meals—such as white and African-Caribbean and Roma
children—do perform/attain more poorly than the average for all 15—16-year-old children in receipt
of free school meals, and considerably more poorly than Chinese and Indian group of such children.
However, the race effect, the effect of being part of a particular ethnic group, has less impact on
achievement and underachievement than does social class. Class analysis is more reliable as a
measure of achievement/underachievement than race analysis.
To return to the broader relationship between race, gender, and social class, and to turn to the
United States, are there many who would deny that Condoleezza Rice and Cohn Powell have more in
common with the Bushes and the rest of the U.S. capitalist class, be it white, black, or Latina/o, than
they do with the workers whose individual ownership of wealth and power is an infinitesimal
fraction of those individual members of the ruling and capitalist class. 0 povo, unido, jtrmais sera
vencido—the workers, united, will never be defeated. In a class war there are many victories and
defeats. With a unity, recognizing and affirming difference, but also affirming class solidarity, such
defeats are less likely. As is shown in the millions of men and women workers, white, black,
Mahgrebian on the streets of Paris and Rome against neoliberalization of public services in recent
years.
Objectively, whatever our race or gender or sexuality or ability, whatever the individual and group
history and fear of oppression and attack, the fundamental form of oppression in capitalism is class
oppression. While the capitalist class is predominantly white and male, capital in theory and in
practice can be color and gender blind—even if that does not happen very often. African Marxist-
Leninists such as Ngugi Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (e.g., Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mini, 1985; Ngugi
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Ngguggi, Moses Isegawa, 2005) know very well that when the white
colonialist oppressors were ejected from direct rule over African states in the 1950s and 1960s, that
the white bourgeoisie in some African states such as Kenya was replaced by a black bourgeoisie,
acting in concert with transnational capital and/or capital(ists) of the former colonial power.
Apple writes that his analyses (of the multilayered and Gramscian lessons about hegemony learned
by the Radical Right in the United States) show that the Left and progressive forces have much to
learn from the success of the Radical Right in the United States. Perhaps what we, and he, should
learn, is that the capitalist class, the male and female, black, brown and white bourgeoisie, actually
do recognize that they survive in dominance as a class, that whatever their skin color, or dreams, or
multifaceted subjectivities and histories of individual or group hurt and triumph, precisely because
they do know they are a class. They have class consciousness. The capitalist class does not disable
itself by negating its class consciousness over issues of race and gender. It gets on with exploiting the
labor of the raced and gendered working class.
R e l a t i v e A u t o n o m i s t A n t i r e p r o d u c t i o n i s m

Apple does not only attack Marxist class analysts. He also expends energy in critiquing those who
point out the social class reproductive nature of capitalist education. In this respect, his books
advance a “relative autonomy” thesis. Thus, Farahmandpur’s critique of Apple is that Apple’s (1993,
1996, 1999)
“recent work on class. . . views social class as a subjective phenomenon that is culturally
determined. . . Michael Apple. . . relegates class as an objective force to a subjective phenomenon
that is by and large culturally determined”
(2004).
As Kelsh and Hill (2006) elaborate, Apple’s analysis of “the social”“where neither the economic, the
political, nor the cultural sphere is determinant” (1993: 25), and instead determination by any
“sphere” is seen to be “historically contingent” (ibid.) advances a view of the social in which local
analyses are the only ones possible.”
Following Ebert (1996), Kelsh and Hill continue,
For historical materialists, however, “cultural and ideological practices are not
autonomous but are instead primary sites for reproducing the meanings and
subjectivities supporting the unequal gender, sexual, and race divisions of labor, and
thus a main arena for the struggle against economic exploitation as well as cultural
oppression.” (Ebert, 1996: 42—43, Italics added)
The work of the knowledge industry (those knowledge workers who update the ruling ideology and
naturalize it), however, is to augment ideology rather than critique it and expose it as a site of class
struggle.
The intensification and extension of capitalism and the unprecedented commodification of the
human, bear out Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. They analyzed the impact of global
capital on the worker:
it has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless
indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable freedom—
Free Trade.
They pointed out that capitalism
left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than
callous “cash payment” and “egotistical calculation.” All would be reduced to “paid
labourers.”
This unprecedented commodification and capitalization of the human would seem to demonstrate
that that the relative autonomy attaching to the political region of the state from the economic, the
autonomy between various vertical and horizontal levels of the state apparatus, and within state
apparatuses, is far less than that claimed by Apple in his attacks on those Marxists who use forms of
reproduction theory.5 While there is (growing) resistance, (e.g., see Hill, 2008a) state apparatuses at
various horizontal levels, apparatuses such as schools, vocational colleges, universities, in nations are
being rolled1 over by the juggernaut of neoliberal capital. (Some) teachers, schools, universities do
8 Dave Hill
resist—but not many, and within very, and increasingly constrained spaces for resistance, for
counterhegemonic practice.
The increased (raced) social class hierarchicalization of education provision and results, which I
describe nationally and globally below, are indeed exemplification of the broad thrust of the
analyses made by Bourdieu, Bowles and Gintis, and by Althusser. Of course, each of these writers
can be critiqued, for example, for internal inconsistency, for leading to a pessimism in the face of the
iron fist of capital, and for downplaying resistance. But the capitalist class system does reproduce
existing patterns of exploitation and domination. And the iron fist of capital is tightening. The bell of
economic determination is now tolling (see Hill, 2001, 2004a, 2004b, 2005a, 2006c, 2007a, 2007b).
As through the control and surveillance of schoolteachers and teacher educators and other
university educator through the mechanisms of new public managerialism, through heavily
prescriptive, assessed, and monitored curricula in schools and teacher education. And more widely,
through the Patriot Act in the United States and decline of civil liberties in the UK.
Recognition that the iron fist of capital is tightening nationally and globally, and inward, into the
human (Rikowski, 2002a, 2002b), and recognition that there is a class war from above, can inform
resistance and anticapitalist action.
Indeed, Farahmandpur (2004) suggests that “*a+long with a number of other scholars on the Left,
Apple has dismissed the centrality of class struggle in efforts at educational reform,” together with
“the vanguard role of the working class in the arena of social change.”
In contrast to the Leninist strategy of “democratic centrism,” in which the vanguard party operated
as the “ideological and political compass” of the proletariat, indeed, in contrast to a workers’ party
per se (whatever its internal political organization and form of democracy) Apple firmly espouses the
notion of a “decentered unity” that consists of an alliance among feminists, multiculturalists, lesbians,
gays, antiracists, environmentalists, peace activists, progressives, and neo-Marxists. Apple asserts
that the Radical Right “has recognized that to win in the state, you must win in civil society.... It
created a decentered unity, one where each element sacrificed some of its particular agenda to push
forward on those areas that bound them together. Can’t we do the same?” (2001: 194—195). And so
Apple calls for a more widely based, but not class-based, broad progressive movement.
While, in Simon’s phrase, “it is. . . necessary to recognize that a pluralism of social movements is a
condition for a fully developed democracy” (1982: 104), there is the possibility that that class
consciousness, socialist consciousness, the transition from a Gramscian “common sense” to a
Gramscian “good sense” can be lost, indeed the belief not only in paths to (peaceful or violent
defensive) socialist revolution can be displaced and disappeared—to the extent that many
communist parties throughout the world actually dissolved themselves following the collapse of the
Soviet-style state capitalist (or on an alternative view “deformed workers’ state”) systems.
That was a loss of confidence, of belief, of class action, of socialism, in the name of a more widely
based, but not class-based, broad progressive movement. This particular “war of position” has,
empirically, led to the (incorrectly termed) center-left of the Clinton and Blair Third Way
transmogrifying—becoming deeply colonized by capital, becoming, indisputably, part of the historic
bloc of the capitalist class. As Bellamy notes, the diminution of class analysis “denies -- immanent
critique of any critical bite,” effectively disarming a meaningful opposition to the capitalist thesis
(1997: 25). And as Harvey notes,
neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the
power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually
narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of justice through
the conquest of state power. It has long proved extremely difficult within the US Left,
to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice
without offending the desire for individual freedom and for full recognition of
particular identities. (2005: 41)
C l a s s A n a l y s i s H a s P o l i t i c a l I m p l i c a t i o n s

The classic and current task as Marxist activists is develop a subjective awareness of class—class
consciousness—if we are to play a role in the transformation from the working class being a class in
itself into a class, to a class (acting) for itself In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx states that the
working class is “already a class against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle. . . this mass
becomes united and constitutes itself as a class for itself” (1977: 214).
In the capitalist countries, the only class which can accompany a real, deep social
transformation is the working class. Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the
primacy of class in a number of senses. One of course is the primacy of the working
class as a revolutionary agent. . . [T]he primacy of class means. . . that building a
multiracial, multi-gendered international working-class organization or organizations
should be the goal of any revolutionary movement so that the primacy of class puts
the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is
rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for understanding the structural
determinants of race, gender, and class oppression.
Class analysis and class consciousness provide not only the understanding and the will—they enable
class action, which in turn can enable the class appropriation, equitable utilization, and democratic
governance of the orchard, of the economy, polity and society, and the ending and transforming of
capitalism into a democratic socialist society. In the process, the nonclass analyses of a few rotten
apples will be thrown aside.
The Growing Global Working Class

The working class [exists] as never before as a class in itself. . . with a core of perhaps
2 billion people, around which there are another 2 billion or so people with lives
which are subject in important ways to the same logic as this core. (Harman, 1999:
615)
If the total size of the working class includes not only those engaged in waged labor, but also those
who are dependent on income that comes from the waged labor of relatives or savings and pensions
resulting from past wage labor—that is, nonemployed spouses, children, and retired elderly people,
then the worldwide total figure for the working class, those completely dependent on wage labor,
comes to between 1.5 and 2 billion, notes Harman (2002).
10 Dave Hill
In addition, there are, globally, millions of “semiproletarians” (which Harman describes as

“semiworkers” or “peasant workers”). In China, for example, more than 100 million people from
peasant households seek at least temporary wage labor in the cities each year. Together, suggests
Harman, the working class and semiworkers constitute somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of
the world’s population.
D e i n d u s t r i a l i z a t i o n a n d t h e S e r v i c e S e c t o r i n A d v a n c e d C a p i t a l i s t E c o n o m i e s

Arguments that the working class has disappeared usually rests on superficial impressions about
what is happening to the old industrial working class, at least in some advanced economies. To take
one example, Polly Toynbee writes, “We have seen the most rapid change in social class in recorded
history: the 1977 mass working class, with two thirds of people in manual jobs, shrunk to one third,
while the rest migrated upwards into a 70 percent home-owning, white collar middle class” (2002;
see also 2003).
Industrial employment has fallen noticeably since the 1970s in quite a number of countries, in
Britain and Belgium by a third, and in France by more than a quarter. But, as Harman (2002) notes,
these do not represent a deindustrialization of the whole of the advanced industrial world.
The number of industrial jobs in the advanced industrial countries as a whole was 112 million in
1998—25 million more than in 1951 and only 7.4 million less than in 1971. In the United States, for
example, the number of industrial workers in industry in 1998 was nearly 20 percent higher than in
1971. “Old” industries have by no means disappeared, or moved abroad. Baldoz, Koeber, and Kraft
note, “more Americans are now employed in making cars, buses and parts of them than at any time
since the Vietnam War” (2001: 7, cited in Harman, 2002: 9). In Japan the industrial workforce more
than doubled between 1950 and 1971 and was another 13 percent higher in 1998.
Furthermore, many jobs classified as “service” jobs are classification/data collection changes only
(see also note 15). As Harman notes,
some of the shift from “industry” to the “service sector” amounts to no more than a
change in the name given to essentially similar jobs. Someone who works in a factory
putting food into a tin so that people can warm it up to eat at home is a
“manufacturing worker”; someone who toils in a fast food shop to provide near-
identical food to people who do not have time to warm it up at home is a “service
worker.” (2002: 10)
In Britain the proportion of people in manual jobs is, in fact, much higher than a third. The Office for
National Statistics’ Living in Britain 2000 shows 51 percent of men and 38 percent of women as
being in its various “manual” occupational categories in 1998 (2001, Table 3.14).
Similarly, in the United States (in 2001) the total service-related occupations of 103 million people
included 18 million in routine “service occupations” with a decidedly manual cast to them (including
nearly a million in “household services,” 2.4 million in “protective services,” 6 million in “food
services,” 3 million in “cleaning and building services,” and 3 million in “personal services”). Then
there were 18 million in routine clerical jobs and 6.75 million sales assistants.
Together these groups constitute well over half the “service sector.” Add to them the 33 million
workers in traditional manual industries, and you have some three quarters of the U.S. population
made-up of workers (Harman, 2002: 15).
P r o l e t a r i a n i s a t i o n o f T e a c h e r s , C o l l e g e L e c t u r e r s , a n d O t h e r S e r v i c e W o r k e r s
S u c h A s H e a l t h W o r k e r s

In addition to these numbers, a number of major occupations, sometimes classed as “services” (e.g.,
Rowthorn, 2001) should be recognized, for the most part (not at the upper managerial echelons) as
working class—in the sense that their labor is essential for the accumulation of capital, groups such
as health workers and education workers.
These workers’ labor has been proletarianized, in terms of intensification of work, loss of autonomy
over the curriculum and pedagogy, being subject to the surveillance and rigors of “new public
managerialism,” payment by results/performance-related pay, increased concern with timekeeping,
and tighter and more punitive discipline codes. Part of this proletarianization has been an increased
level of identification by such service workers and “education professionals” with the working-class
movement, workers’ struggle, and industrial action. That is by increased working-class consciousness.
Social Class, Economic Class, and Class Consciousness

There are significant issues concerning intraclass differentiation and about class consciousness. It is
important to recognize that class, for Marx, is neither simply monolithic nor static. Marx conceived
of classes as internally differentiated entities. Under capitalist economic laws of motion, the working
class in particular is constantly decomposed and reconstituted due to changes in the forces of
production—forces of which members of the working class are themselves a part.6 Furthermore,
Marx had taken great pains to stress that social class as distinct from economic class necessarily
includes a political dimension, which is in the broadest sense of the term “culturally” rather than
“economically” determined.
And, class-consciousness does not follow automatically or inevitably from the fact of class position.
The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) distinguishes between a “class-in-itself” (class position) and a
“class-for itself” (class-consciousness); The Communist Manifesto explicitly identifies the “formation
of the proletariat into a class” as the key political task facing the communists. In The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Marx observes,
In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that divide
their mode of life, their interests and their cultural formation from those of the other
classes and bring them into conflict with those classes, they form a class. In so far as
these small peasant proprietors are merely connected on a local basis, and the
identity of their interests fails to produce a feeling of community, national links, or a
political organisation, they do not form a class. (1852/1999)
Thus social class exists in a contingent rather than a necessary relation to economic class. The process
(and conceptual category) that links economic and social class is that of “class- consciousness.” This is
arguably the most contentious and problematic term in the debate over class.
12 Dave Hill
To repeat, if there is one class that does not lack class-consciousness, the subjective appreciation of
its common interest, and its relationship within the means of production to other social classes, it is
the capitalist class. Currently, in this period of neoliberal capitalism, there is, in advanced capitalist
countries, class war from above. Here, the “crucial protagonists are usually those who own or
control the main means of domination in capitalist society” (Miliband, 1991: 56, 117).
In Britain the period between 1970 and 1985 was one of intense class struggle from below, as well as
from above, marked by a series of major industrial actions: strikes by miners, dockers, and
construction workers in the early 1970s, the Grunwick photo development workers’ strike of the late
1970s, the so-called Winter of Discontent that preceded the defeat of the Callaghan Labor
government in 1979, the Great Miners Strike of 1984— 1985 and the Wapping printworkers’ strike
against the Murdoch Press, which marked the end of this sequence. Following the Thatcher
government’s victory over the miners in 1985, sympathetic strikes were banned, cooling- off periods
and compulsory postal ballots prior to strike action were enforced and widescale union
derecognition occurred.7
In the current period of neoliberal capitalism, major aspects of class war from above have been the
gamut of neoliberal fiscal, welfare, and employment policies. I now describe such policies in the
education sector.
Part Two: Neoliberal Education Policies

Neoliberal Policies: Educational Marketization, Commodification, and
Privatization
The national faces of neoliberal policies vary in detail and extent. This is partly a function of the
balance of class forces in any given polity, what ruling leaderships in government, acting on behalf of
their national capitals, think they can and try to get away with, and how effectively they are resisted.
In general, privatization of education, the private taking over of public institutions, and the growth of
the private sector, tends, as yet, to characterize
neoliberal policy in developing and less developed countries, such as Chile, Brazil, Haiti, Pakistan
rather than developed countries (See Hill, 2005a, 2006a, The Rich World; Shugurensky and Davidson-
Harden, 2003; Mukhtar, 2008; Hill et a!., forthcoming; Hill and Kumar, forthcoming; Hill and Rosskam,
forthcoming). However, as yet slow trends, for example, in the United States, Spain, England, and
Wales indicate this will very likely become typical in developed countries, too.
Developed Countries
Pr i v a t i z a t i o n

In most developed countries, outright privatization of publicly funded schools has not taken place.
The Academies program in England and Wales is close to but not the same as privatization. Rikowski
(2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2006b)8 notes that policies that can be seen to be preprivatizing, in the sense
of both “softening up” public opinion for private control, and establishing an exacerbated hierarchy
of schools, are the voucher system and charter schools, as, for example, in the United States—and,
indeed, the scheduled 200 academies in England and Wales (Beckett, 2007).
E d u c a t i o n a l M a n a g e m e n t O r g a n i z a t i o n s a n d C h a r t e r S c h o o l s i n t h e U n i t e s
S t a t e s

In 1999, 13 education management organizations (EMOs) such as Edison Schools, Inc., were
attempting to run schools “for-profit.” They managed 135 for-profit schools in 15 states. Today, 51
companies manage 463 schools in 28 states and the District of Columbia, 81 percent of which are
charter schools. The for-profit management of public schools generally takes two major forms: local
school districts contracting with an EMO for the management of existing traditional K-12 public
schools (termed “contract schools”) or EMOs managing public charter schools either as the charter
holder or under the terms of a contract with the charter holder. Charters have been expected to
grow exponentially under the George W. Bush’s federal education law, “No Child Left Behind,” which
holds out conversion to charter schools as one solution for chronically failing traditional schools
(Schemo, 2004). Hursh (2002) is one of many who point out that most schools, under current U.S.
measures of measuring “failure,” are “born to fail.” It is likely that the number of charter schools will
grow dramatically.
These are means of softening up the education service to business control and various forms of
profit making by capital. Rikowski goes further, and suggest that any degree of privatization and
private involvement acts as a “profit virus,” that once a public service such as education is infected
(“virused”) by private company involvement, then it will inevitably become liable to GATS
regulations, and open up to free trade in services by national and by multinational and foreign
capital (2003). Schools can enter into deals with private sector outfits. They can also sell educational
services to other schools.
In Britain there is currently what may be seen as the “hidden” preprivatization of state schools in
England by enabling schools to function as “little businesses” through increased autonomies and
business-like managements and corporate aspects, and the ability, within the 2002 Education Act
and the 2006 Education and Inspections Act 2006 (DfES, 2006) for schools to act as capitalist
enterprises in terms of their ability to merge and engage in takeovers of other schools (Rikowski,
2005, 2006a).
Privatization takes many forms other1 than the outright control (whether “for profit” or “not for
profit.” In Britain, the Centre for Public Services’ booklet of 2003, Mortgaging Our Children’s Future,
analyzes the various policies and initiatives underway in secondary schools in England and Wales
(see also Rikowski, 2005a; Hill, 2006c). It discusses Making Markets, City Academies, and Specialist
Schools, School Companies, the Excellence in Cities Program, Privatizing Local Education Authorities,
the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), Outsourcing/Restructuring of School Meals, the Education Action
Zones Policy.
C o m m e r c i a l i s m a n d M a r k e t i z a t i o n

One aspect of profit taking in education is commercialization of education. Direct commercial
penetration is evident in the increasing use of commercially sponsored materials in the classroom
and around the school. Whitty (2000) notes that the growing influence of commercial organizations
as consultants in public provision can itself contribute to a change in the ethos of the sector. He
comments,
14 Dave Hill
while they might strictly be regarded as elements of marketization, they could also
be considered a prelude to privatization in the fuller sense of the privately funded
and privately provided education Many critics of devices like devolved budgeting,
internal markets, cost-centres and self-governing state schools competing in the
marketplace, have been seen as examples of “creeping privatization.” (2000: 3)
Whitty suggests that some aspects of marketization contribute to privatization in an ideological if

not a strictly economic sense, even where quasi-markets are confined to public sector providers.
Aspects of ideological privatization include fostering the belief that the private sector approach is
superior to that traditionally adopted in the public sector; requiring public sector institutions to
operate more like those in the private sector; and encouraging private (individual/family) decision
making. The increasing emphasis on competition and choice has also brought with it what Whitty
calls a “hidden curriculum” of marketization. This is far less hidden now than when Whiny wrote in
2000:
both conservative and New Labour general election manifestos for the May 2005 general election
stressed competition and privatization (Labour Party, 2005) and the 2006 Education and Inspections
Act has taken this further, in particular with its expansion of the Academies program, referred to
below.
S c h o o l h o u s e C o m m e r c i a l i s m i n t h e U n i t e s S t a t e s

Possibly the most consistent and thorough analysis of “schoolhouse commercialism” is that by
Molnar in the United States (e.g., Molnar, 2004; Molnar et al., 2004). For example his latest (sixth)
No Student Left Unsold—Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends—examines the
following eight types of schoolhouse commercialism, and most are showing a year-on-year increase
(Molnar et al., 2004).
Among those cited types of schoolhouse commercialism are corporate sponsorship of school
programs and activities; exclusive agreements—agreements giving marketers exclusive rights to sell
a product or a service on school or district grounds; incentive programs—the use of commercial
products or services as rewards for achieving an academic goal; appropriation of space—the selling
of naming rights or advertising space on school premises or property; corporately sponsored
educational materials; through to actual privatization—the private ownership of publicly funded
schools, private management of publicly funded schools, public charter schools, and private, for-
profit school involvement in voucher programs.
It is likely that many of these developments will assume increasing salience in schools and colleges in
England and Wales, especially with the anticipated growth in the number secondary schools (high
schools in the United States) publicly funded but privately sponsored and controlled Academies.
Developing and Less Developed Countries

The growth of the private sector in schooling and in higher education is far more pronounced in
developing and less developed countries. In a number of states, such as Pakistan and China,9
governments simply request private companies to fill the gap of nonprovision publicly built and
staffed/equipped schooling. In others, such as Haiti, Brazil, Thailand, public provision of schooling is
of such poorer quality that the effect is the same—effective schooling is left to private companies—
some not-for-profit (such as some religious schools), others very much for profit. Increasingly, for
example, in Latin America, the profits from for-profit schools flow not only to national corporations,
but also to U.S. chains and brands of schools (See Shugurensky and Davidson-Harden, 2003; Hill,
2005a, 2006a).
Part Three: Impacts of Neoliberal Education Policies

Impacts of Neoliberalization of Schooling on Workers’ Pay, Conditions, and
Securities
Globally, where neoliberalism has triumphed in education, common results have been increased
casualization of academic labor, increased proletarianization, increased pay and conditions
differentials within education sectors, cuts in the wages/salaries and in “the social wage” of state
benefits and rights, cuts, increased intensification of labor, with larger classes, decreased autonomy
for school and college teachers over curriculum and pedagogy, increased levels of surveillance,
monitoring and report-writing, and accompanying increased levels of stress. There is also the
curtailment of trade union rights and attacks on trade unions as organizations that defend and
promote working- class interests.
Radical change, or restructuring, of an education institution either means fewer and/or different
teachers, professional staff, and support workers. This means lay-offs, forced early retirements, or
dismissals, as in the closure of institutions deemed ineffective or failing, and a radical change in what
governments and schools and colleges themselves see as their mission. Instead of the liberal-
humanist or social democratic ends of education, human capital is now the production focus of very
many education systems and institutions.
Trade union rights and capacities are under attack in many countries through a number of means.
Performance Related Pay (PRP) is being introduced in various countries, undermining the collective
bargaining function of trade unions. The current trend to introduce performance-related pay in
higher education in England and Wales, a trend that can be observed all over the world, is
challenging established structure of collective bargaining. This is a form of individual pay bargaining.
Globally, the World Bank insists (e.g., in Brazil) on the introduction of an additional remuneration for
federal higher institution teaching personnel based on individual performance (Siqueira, 2005).
This is part of the deregulation agenda of neoliberal capital, to undermine nationally agreed pay and
conditions, and to replace them with locally negotiated agreements. Furthermore, the
decentralization of control, the autonomy of education institutions, weakens union abilities to act.
The transfer of negotiations from the national to the provincial or local level, such, in England and
Wales, school level or university level, can lead to different pay scales. Unions oppose this because it
strikes at the heart of professional equity, under which teachers having similar qualifications can
expect the same pay and conditions at any education institution of the same level across the country.
This weakens unions! Without strong unions, the pay and working conditions of average
teachers/lecturers will further deteriorate, except for the few who receive performance-related pay
enhancements or other “merit rewards.”
16 Dave Hill
Casualization, Temporary Contracts, and the Trend to a Part-Time

Workforce
One way that teachers as workers are kept in line is through job insecurity. Staff on fixed-term
contracts have the least job security in the sector, and usually have inferior terms and conditions to
their permanent colleagues. Fixed-term contracts leave many staff feeling very exposed and
undervalued; having difficulty finding things such as loans, mortgages, and other financial benefits
and are discriminatory, as their use disproportionately affects women, black, and other minority
groups of workers. They harm the possibility of career progression as individuals find themselves
stuck on the lowest pay grades, on a succession of short-term, poorly funded projects that offer no
room for staff development; mean staff coming to the end of contracts must inevitably spend time
applying for funding or other posts (UCU,2006: 161).
In England and Wales, as well as more part-time employment, the

postincorporation/postdecentralization further education college sector has made increasingly
greater use of temporary staff. Using the census returns to the funding council 1994—1995, NATFHE
(National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education) estimated that 42 percent of staff
employed for more than 15 hours per week had temporary contracts, this compared to a national
average across all sectors of 9 percent (Hill, 200 6a).
Not only is casual work increasing, so is part-time work. In the United States, for example, the
percentage of part-time work within all faculty at community colleges rose from 22 percent in 1970
to 60 percent in 2001 (Longmate and Cosco, 2002: B14). In England and Wales, since further
education colleges were changed from publicly controlled and funded colleges in 1993 into publicly
funded independent colleges, there has been a decline in core funding. There are more part-time
staff, less teaching hours for students and an increased use of temporary and agency staff. In 1995—
1996, the funding council estimated that 55 percent of all college staff and 39 percent of teaching
staff worked part time. This compares to a NATFHE estimate of 15 percent part-time working prior
to incorporation, that is, decentralization (Hill, 2006a).
In universities in England and Wales there are more part-time staff, less teaching hours for students
and an increased use of temporary and fixed-term contact staff. Nearly half of academic and
academic-related staff are on fixed-term posts, a figure that rises to an astounding 93 percent for
research- only staff (AUT, 2004b). And in the United States the share of faculty members who are
tenured declined from 35 percent to 32 percent between 1992—1993 and 1998—1999 (Hill, 2006a).
One reason is the increasing share of faculty that teaches part time since the majority of them are
not tenured.
A further aspect of proletarianization is substitutability—and increasingly, nonqualified teachers are

replacing qualified teachers in some countries. McLaren et al. (2004: 1) comment that “*i+n California
more than 47,000 uncertified teachers are teaching in its public schools. . . in Baltimore. . . over one
third of the school district’s teachers do not hold full teaching credentials.” Substitutability is one of
the defining characteristics of deprofessionalization, or proletarianization.
P a y a n d C o n d i t i o n s

A key element of capital’s plans for education is to cut its labor costs. For this, a deregulated labor
market is essential—with schools and colleges able to set their own pay scales and sets of
conditions—busting national trade union agreements, and, weakening union powers to protect their
workforces. The growth of the private sector in education globally, as a form of extreme
deregulation and decentralization, together with the deregulated decentralization of quasi-market
schooling systems have impacted notably on education workers’ pay and conditions.
For example, in Pakistan, private schools offer 35—80 percent less salary while job security and
career prospectus are the missing elements in mostly short-term/temporary assignments. Pensions,
medical, and other facilities and group insurance, and so on are not taken care of by most of the
schools in private sector. In England and Wales, the neoliberalization of Schools and Further
Education Colleges has taken a number of forms. Widespread contracting out of school meals,
school cleaning, and other services to schools and colleges in the 1980s led to severe deterioration
of pay and conditions for thousands of low-paid mainly women workers.
In higher education, too, pay levels have deteriorated. In England and Wales, university staff salaries
have declined by 37 percent in comparison to the rest of the nation’s workforce since 1981 (AUT,
2004a). And the current policy by government (being resisted by the AUT, and by its successor, the
UCU (University and College Union) is to establish local pay bargaining.
Even the percentage of full-time teaching staff working in nontenure track position in the United
States has increased in recent years, from 8 percent in 1987 to 18 percent in 1998. In other words, a
growing number of institutions do not offer tenure. Lower status higher education institutions,
community colleges, are least likely to offer tenure and public research universities the most likely,
according to the study of the Education Department.
Finally, most part-time workers are hourly paid rather than on permanent fractional contracts and
hence have no job security other than the one commonly agreed for the year ahead. They are
second-class citizens in the academy.
N e o l i b e r a l i s m a n d W i d e n i n g C l a s s I n e q u a l i t i e s Gl o b a l l y

There has been an increase in (gendered, raced, linguistically differentiated) social class inequalities
in educational provision, attainment, and subsequent position in the labor market. For example, the
movement to voucher and charter schools as well as other forms of privatized education such as
chains of schools in United States (Molnar, 2004; Molnar et al., 2004) and, suggests Rikowski (2005a,
2005b) in future “federations of schools” (in the UK) have proven to be disproportionately beneficial
to those segments of society who can afford to pay for better educational opportunities and
experiences, leading to further social exclusion and polarization. (For example, see Whitty et al.,
1998; Gillborn and Youdell, 2000.)
Hirtt has noted the apparently contradictory education policies of capital, “to adapt education to the
needs of business and at the same time reduce state expenditure on education.” He suggests that
this contradiction is resolved by the polarization of the labor market, that from an economic point of
view it is not necessary to provide high level education and of general knowledge, to all future
workers: “it is now possible and even highly recommendable to have a more polarized education
system. . . education should not try to transmit a broad common culture to the majority of future
workers, but instead it should teach them some basic, general skills” (Hirtt, 2004: 446).
18 Dave Hill
In brief, then, manual and service workers are to receive cheaper, inferior, transferable skills
education, knowledge and elite workers to receive more expensive and more and internationally
superior education—one manifestation of the hierarchicalization of schools and the end of the
comprehensive ideal. Indeed, this is a form of educational triage—with basic skills training for
millions of workers, more advanced education for supervision for middle class and in some countries
the brightest of the working classes, and elite education for scions of the capitalist, and other
sections of the ruling classes.
Reimers notes that
the poor have less access to preschool, secondary, and tertiary education; they also
attend schools of lower quality where they are socially segregated. Poor parents
have fewer resources to support the education of their children, and they have less
financial, cultural, and social capital to transmit. Only policies that explicitly address
inequality, with a major redistributive purpose, therefore, could make education an
equalizing force in social opportunity. (2000: 55)
T h e W o r l d B a n k , P r i v a t i z a t i o n , a n d E q u i t y

The policies of the World Bank encourage this triage. While the World Bank nominally seeks equity,
it also encourages the growth of an “educational private sector.” This position is also emphasized by
the IFC (International Finance Corporation) in IFC document entitled “Investing in Private Education:
IFC’s Strategic Directions.” This outlines outline how fee-paying educational institutions, that is
movement away from free education, might “improve” equity:
Private education can indirectly benefit the lowest socioeconomic groups by

attracting families who can afford some level of fee away from the public system,
thereby increasing capacity and per student spending for the students who remain in
the public system. Similarly, the emergence of private tertiary institutions allows
governments to reduce funding in such institutions and instead to invest in lower
levels of education, thus improving distributive efficiency. (IFC, 2001: 5)
There is a critical difference between conceptions of equity based on universal notions of access and
those based on choice. The goals and principles of universal access, represented by international
covenants such as the UN convention on economic, social, and cultural rights as well as in many
Latin American charters, declarations, and educational reforms (cf. Schugurensky and Davidson-
Harden, 2003) reflect a different notion of educational equity than that promoted by the IFC.
I n c r e a s i n g I n e q u a l i t i e s : P o l a r i z e d S c h o o l i n g a n d C h e r r y - P i c k i n g

The liberalization of services such as schooling and further education is playing a very significant part
in the increased and increasing inequalities within states marked by the intensification and
exaggeration of (racialized and gendered) social class based and (in developing states rural/urban)
differentiation in access and attainment. In sum, the poor have less access to preschool, secondary,
and tertiary education; they also attend schools of lower quality where they are socially segregated.
One result of private schooling is that private schools “cream-skim” or “cherry-pick” wealthier
families’ children who are more equipped to succeed at school, with a corresponding burden on
public system schools to absorb students with higher needs and challenges. As Hall notes, it also
undermines the financial solidarity on which public services are based, undermines
the political consensus needed to sustain public services, and draws resources away
from those services into a consumer-oriented market. It may be exacerbated by
cutting back of resources dedicated to public services, which reduces the quality of
the public service and encourages those who can pay to buy themselves more
resources from the private sector. (2003: 28)
Hall gives some examples—and effects—of the introduction or growth of private sector schools.
Social Watch identified this process in Costa Rica: where quality public education has been a major
factor in social equity and high living standards, a private school boom now draws better-off
students away from public schools with declining resources. Thus, education has changed from being
a mechanism for social mobility to becoming an instrument of status and exclusion; in Malaysia,
where “two systems have emerged: higher quality private education for those who can afford it and
poorer quality public education for those with low incomes” (ibid.: 26).
In South Africa, Educational International notes that the introduction of some charges for schooling
“has created a two-tier system within public schooling: schools for the rich and schools for the poor”
(2003b: 11). In Brazil, Gindin (in Hill, 2006a) reports that even though a greater proportion of the
population than decades ago has access to education, the system is still highly segmented, that
public (i.e., state) schools at the basic education level—which are free of charge—are for poor
people and private schools are for the rich. The poor are systematically excluded from higher
education. In Haiti, Education International reports that nearly 90 percent of Haitian schools are
private, though parents have a choice between sending their children to a private school or to a
state school. Some private schools are set up for the elite. Schools of the latter type are often run by
religious institutions. State schools are completely free of charge, but nevertheless children
attending them do pay a price: classes are grossly overcrowded and the education standards are
mediocre (Education International, 2003a).
Ge n d e r e d a n d R a c e d S o c i a l C l a s s I n e q u a l i t i e s

When schooling is not universal, compulsory, and free, then the resulting social bifurcation and
reproduction, as well as being social class specific, is gender specific. The 2003/4 Global Monitoring
Report on Education for All by UNESCO (2004) condemns the imposition of school fees as
“deterrents for poor families” that “force them to make the choice to reserve education
opportunities only for boys.” This point is also made in the UNICEF State of the World’s Children
Report 2004 (Education International, 2004).
The education needs of indigenous peoples are also not met where schooling is not free, universal,
and compulsory. Literacy rates and attendance rates of indigenous children are generally lower than
the national averages throughout many states. In Bolivia, for example, indigenous children receive
about three years less schooling than nonindigenous children. In the view of Education International,
indigenous peoples’ education requires specific attention from policymakers, educators, and
indigenous communities (Education International, 2003b: 5).
20 Dave Hill
I n c r e a s i n g S o c i a l , E c o n o m i c , a n d E d u c a t i o n a l I n e q u a l i t i e s i n B r i t a i n

In assessing the impacts of neoliberal policies on education and on societies, I will conclude this
chapter with a brief examination of one country, the UK.
In the UK, the wealth of the super-rich has doubled since Tony Blair came to power in 1997,
according to a report on social inequality produced by the Office for National Statistics. Nearly
600,000 individuals in the top 1 percent of the UK wealth league owned assets worth £355 billion in
1996, the last full year of conservative rule. By 2002 that had increased to £797 billion. Part of the
gain was due to rising national prosperity, but the top 1 percent also increased their share of
national wealth from 20 percent to 23 percent in the first six years of the Labour government.
Meanwhile the wealth of the poorest 50 percent of the population shrank from 10 percent in 1986
toward the end of the Thatcher government’s second term to 7 percent in 1996 and 5 percent in
2002 (Kampfner, 2005).
And the working classes are paying more tax, with the richest groups paying less, in comparison to
1949 and to the late 1970s—that is, at the end of two periods of what might be termed “Old Labour,”
or social democratic governments (in ideological contradistinction to the primarily neoliberal policies
of New Labour). As a percentage of income, middle, and high earners in Britain pay less tax in 2003
than at any time for 30 years. It is the poorest, the lowest paid, who are paying more. In comparison
with the late 1970s, the “fat cats” (Johnson and Lynch, 2004) are now paying around half as much
tax (income tax and insurance contribution rate). The fat cats are paying less income tax and
national¥insurance as a percentage of their earned income than in 1949. In contrast, the average tax
rate for the low paid is roughly double that of the early 1970s—and nearly twice as much as in 1949.
The subtitle for their article is “sponging off the poor.”“As a percentage of income, middle and high
earners pay less tax now than at any time in the past thirty years” (ibid.).
The above data concerns the UK—but it is replicated in essence in other advanced capitalist states.
To take one example, in the United States, Korten (2004:17) highlights the immense increase in
salaries taken by top executives since the early 1990s has shown that in the United States between
1990 and 1999 inflation increased by 27.5 percent, workers’ pay by 32.3 percent, corporate profits
by 116 percent, and, finally, the pay of chief executive officers by a staggering, kleptocratic, 535
percent.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to indicate how neoliberal policies of marketization, commodification,
and privatization of public services comprise an intensification of class war from above by the
capitalist class against the working class.
This chapter has shown how the class war from above is being fought on many fronts. Three of these,
described in this chapter, resulting from policy changes in the education sector result, are (1)
widening social class educational inequalities; (2) attacks on the key working-class organizations—
trade unions; and (3) worsening pay and conditions of education workers.
In this chapter, I argue these developments highlight Marxist analyses that social class is the
essential and the salient structural cleavage, and form of exploitation, in the current period of
neoliberal capitalist globalization, as indeed in all other capitalist periods. I also tried to advance a
more structuralist reproductionist Marxist analysis, a classical Marxist analysis, as compared to the
postmodern analyses, social movement analysis, and revisionist Left/Left liberal analyses, such as
that of Apple.
Notes
1. As Kelsh and Hill (2006) note,
By “revisionist left,” we mean, following Rosa Luxemburg (1899/1970), those theorists who consider
themselves to be “left” but who believe there is no alternative to capitalism, and thus do “not expect
to see the contradictions of capitalism mature.” Their theories consequently aim “to lessen, to
attenuate, the capitalist contradictions”—in short, to “adjust”“the antagonism between capital and
labor.” As Luxemburg explained, the core aim of the revisionist left is the “bettering of the situation
of the workers and. . . the conservation of the middle classes.”
2. I have criticized other aspects of Apple’s work, his espousal of relative autonomy theory, in Hill
(2001, 2005b); Cole et al. (2001); Kelsh and Hill (2006).
So has Farahmandpur (2004).
3. He continued his critique in Apple (2006a). Rikowski has made a thorough critique of this, Apple’s
latest article, in Rikowski (2006).
4. As Kelsh and Hill (2007) note,
In the place of the Marxist theory of class, the revisionist left has installed a
Weberian-derived notion of class as a tool of classification useful only to describe
strata of people, as they appear at the level of culture and in terms of status derived
from various possessions, economic, political, or cultural. Use of such classifications
can be useful in exposing differentials. But for what purpose is such exposure useful?
That is, who benefits from it?
Such differentials, because they are not understood from the vantage point of a
binary concept of class, are used to fracture the working class by promoting anger,
envy, guilt and blame among its various fractions. What is masked from workers,
because the capitalist class and its agents work to augment ideology in place of
knowledge, is that some workers are poor not because other workers are wealthy,
but because the capitalist class exploits all workers, and then divides and
hierarchizes them, according capitalist class needs for extracting ever more surplus
value (profit). However, as a tool of categorization, such a concept of class cannot
provide reliable knowledge to guide transformative praxis. It can provide indications
and motivations for reformist measures, such as social democratic redistributive
expenditure and policy programmes, but these are limited in nature. Ultimately, as
we explain, such Weberian- derived classifications serve to occlude class
consciousness and the class contradiction within Capital.
5. I argue this at length in Hill (2001, 2005a); Kelsh and Hill (2006); and in Cole et al. (2001).
22 Dave Hill
6. The most obvious and profound consequence in Britain of a modification in the social composition
of the workforce is the vast reduction in manual working class in line with the collapse of
manufacturing industries such as steel, shipbuilding, and coal—the proletariat, and the substantial
increase in the professional and managerial strata. In making this internal distinction it is important
to note that the designation of “proletarian” identifies only that section of the working class who are
directly involved in the production of surplus-value. Members of the proletariat are by definition
part of the working class whilst most working-class people in Britain are no longer proletarians
(Gordon, 1995: 36).
There are manifestly different layers, or strata among the working classes. Skilled workers (if in work,
and particularly in full-time, long-term work), in general have a higher standard of living than
semiskilled or unskilled, or unemployed workers. Their weekly and annual income is likely to be
considerably higher. And their wealth is likely to be higher. They are more likely, for example, to
have equity, or surplus-value, on an owner-occupied home. In contrast, poorer families, in poorer
sections of the working class, may have no wealth whatsoever, and are far more likely to live in
private rented accommodation or in rented council housing (what in the United States is termed,
“the Projects”).
Another important “internal” class distinction, and one which is inevitable as many workers no
longer directly produce surplus-value, is the growth of a professional and managerial stratum. That is
those who are “between capital and labour” in the sense that whilst being entirely dependent on
capital, often in the shape of the national or local state, they exercise supervisory functions over the
working class (Walker, 1979: 5; Subversion, 1998). Examples of this category would be social workers,
teachers, lecturers in further and higher education, probation officers, employment service workers,
and so forth. Many of them have a consciousness of status in which they place themselves above
other, especially manual, sectors of the working class. (Indeed, the Ehrenreichs talk of a professional
and managerial class [PMC] [Walker, 1979: 51.)
Some, of course, though not many, retain a working-class consciousness, family, social, and political
affiliations while, pace casualization and proletarianization of many managerial and professional jobs,
at the same time benefiting from superior income, conditions of work, and wealth.
For a debate on, and rebuttal of, the thesis that “class is dead,” and/or that the working class has
diminished to the point of political insignificance, see Callinicos and Harman (1987); Callinicos
(1995); German (1996); Harman (2002); Hill Ct al. (2002); Kelsh and Hill (2006); Smith (2007).
7. For a Left description and analysis of these struggles see Livingstone (1987); Cliff and Gluckstein
(1996); Hatton (1988); Taaffe and Mulhearn (1988);
Harman/Socialist Worker (1993); Benn (1996); Ali (2005).
Tony Cliff, Donny Gluckstein, and Chris Harman are/were leading members of the Trotskyist Socialist
Workers Party (which then became the major component of the Socialist Alliance around the 2001
general election in Britain and is currently the leading component of the RESPECT coalition. RESPECT
won a number of council seats in the May 2005 local elections and one MP, George Galloway, in the
2005 general election.
Derek Hatton, Peter Taaffe, and Tony Mulhearn were leading members of “Militant” (renamed The
Socialist Party following its expulsion from the Labor Party in the late 1980s). It was, during the
1980s, one of the two most significant Trotskyist groups in Britain, having two of its members (and
another five close sympathisers) elected as members of parliament, controlling dozens of
Constituency Labour Parties, and controlling Liverpool City Council through the mid 1980s. Currently
the Socialist Party has a handful of local council seats.
Tariq Ali was a leader of the third of the influential Trotskyite parties/groups over the past 40 years,
the International Marxist Group (now the International Socialist Group).
Tony Benn has been the leading figure in democratic socialist (or hard) Left through the 1980s and
1990s. He remains in the Labour Party. Benn is “the grand old man” of British Hard Left politics. He
left parliament as an MP in 2005, “to devote more time to politics.”
8. Academies are publicly funded schools that are independent of the democratically elected local
authorities (known as “school districts” in the United States). They have voluntary or private sector
sponsors who control the school, or series of schools. The British government intends to have at
least 200 academies established or in the pipeline by 2010 (DfES, 2006). Academies are outside LEA
control. They can set their own pay and conditions, and change/”vary” the curriculum. The price of
buying control of an academy, a state school (with its buildings, teachers, pupils, and curriculum) is
between £2 and £2 and a half million. The government/taxpayer funds the £25 million
building/rebuilding/ start-up costs and hands control to whichever business person, or corporation,
or religious group has stumped up the two-and-a-half million pounds purchase price.
In the discussion on the 2005 White Paper (i.e., the then proposed legislation) and the 2006
Education and Inspections Bill, a number of Old Labour MPs rebelled over “selling off state schools
to assorted fringe Christian groups and secondhand car salesmen” (see, e.g., Paton *2006+; The
Socialist [2006]; Wintour [2006]). There is widespread, and sometimes successful, opposition to
Academies, some of which is detailed at Socialist Teachers’ Alliance (2007), and the website of the
Anti-Academies Alliance (2007), and in Beckett (2007).
9. Zhou Ji (2005), China’s Minister of Education typifies education policy in many developing
countries on private schools in announcing
Encouraging the development of private schools will be necessary to meet the

country’s growing educational demands. Private schools have played an important
role in offering more chances to students and help ease the pressure on crowded
public schools.
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From “Hill, D.

Neoliberalization of education has five major effects. These are the

1. increases in inequalities both within and between states;

Part One: Social Class Analysis

This Pakulski argues,

personal and social conditions need to be continually created, recreated, and

I want to make a fourfold criticism of Apple’s position. These relate to

1. his analysis of social class classification;

Following Ebert (1996), Kelsh and Hill continue,

They pointed out that capitalism

The Growing Global Working Class

In addition, there are, globally, millions of “semiproletarians” (which Harman describes as

Social Class, Economic Class, and Class Consciousness

Part Two: Neoliberal Education Policies

Whitty suggests that some aspects of marketization contribute to privatization in an ideological if

Developing and Less Developed Countries

Part Three: Impacts of Neoliberal Education Policies

Casualization, Temporary Contracts, and the Trend to a Part-Time

In England and Wales, as well as more part-time employment, the

A further aspect of proletarianization is substitutability—and increasingly, nonqualified teachers are

Reimers notes that

Private education can indirectly benefit the lowest socioeconomic groups by

So has Farahmandpur (2004).

4. As Kelsh and Hill (2007) note,

Harman/Socialist Worker (1993); Benn (1996); Ali (2005).

Encouraging the development of private schools will be necessary to meet the

Ali, T. (2005) Street-Fighting Years (London: Verso).

Anti-Academies Alliance. (2007) Available at http://www.antiacademies.org.uk/.

Association of University Teachers (AUT). (2004a) Higher Education Funding. Available at

• (2004b) Security Alert II—Ending the Abuse of Fixed-Term Contracts. Available at

Beckett, F. (2007) The Great City Academy Fraud (London: Continuum).

Dreyfus Affair to the Rushdie Affair, 25—44 (London: Routledge).

Benn, T. (1996) The Benn Diaries (London: Arrow Books).

Centre for Public Services). Available at

• (2002) Resistance Postmodernism: Progressive Politics or Rhetorical Left Posturing? In D. Hill,

Dehal, I. (2006) Still Aiming High. Available at

German, L. (1996) A Question of Class (London: Bookmarks).

• (1999) A Peoples History of the World (London: Bookmarks).

D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hatton,

D. (1988) Inside Left, the Story So Far (London: Bloomsbury Publishing).

Hirtt, N. (2004) Three Axes of Merchandisation. European Educational Research

Journal, 3 (2): 442—453. Available at http://www.wwwords.co.uk/eerj/.

Hursh, D. (2002) Neoliberalism and the Control of Teachers, Students, and

Kampfner, J. (2005) The Bling-Bling List. New Statesman, 7 March. Available at

Korten, D. (2004) Sustainable Development: Conventional versus Emergent Alternative Wisdom.

Livingstone, K. (1987) If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It (London: Collins).

Marx, K. (1847) Poverty of Philosophy. Available at

(1977) Selected Writings, ed. D. McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Pakulski, J. and M. Waters. (1996) The Death of Class (London: Sage).

Paton, G. (2006) Onward Christian Sponsors. Times Educational Supplement. 7Apr11.

Schugurensky, D. and A. Davidson-Harden. (2003) From Cordoba to Washington: WTO/GATS and

Simon, R. (1982) Gramsci’s Political Thought (London: Lawrence and Wishart).

The Socialist. (2000) World Education Report2000 (Paris: UNESCO).

Socialist Teachers’ Alliance. (2006) Campaigns: Academies and Anti-privatisation. Available at

Toynbee, P. (2003) Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain (London: Bloomsbury).

UNESCO. (2000) World Education Report 2000 (Paris: UNESCO).

Wright, E. 0. (1985) Classes (London: Verso).

• (2005) Approaches to Class Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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