{"id":19285,"date":"2012-05-28T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=19285"},"modified":"2012-11-18T00:06:53","modified_gmt":"2012-11-18T00:06:53","slug":"modernitys-other-and-the-transformation-of-the-university","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/05\/modernitys-other-and-the-transformation-of-the-university\/","title":{"rendered":"Modernity\u2019s Other and the Transformation of the University – I"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Talk to Faculty Members at the University of Cape Town, South Africa – Feb 17 2012<\/em><\/p>\n

Thank you for the kind introduction.\u00a0 Let me say first that I fear I may give the impression that I already know the right answers to the questions I pose.\u00a0\u00a0 Really I don\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0 I want to be understood as proposing theses for discussion.<\/p>\n

Let me first state my main thesis.\u00a0 It is that society as a whole and the university as a leading part of society need to revive some of the norms of African society prior to European contact.\u00a0\u00a0 One could say the same about traditional norms in other parts of the world.\u00a0 I mention Africa because we are here.\u00a0\u00a0 My co-authors and I advocate transformation of modernity by enlargement.\u00a0 That means bringing in more of modernity\u2019s other, pre-modernity and non-modernity, but it does not mean casting out the achievements of modernity.\u00a0 This central point runs through the suggestions I will be making regarding the place of the university in the global economy, its curriculum, capitalism, ecology,\u00a0\u00a0 the university of the future, modernity, and a plural economy.<\/p>\n

I am a pessimist, although once you get past all my pessimism I am an\u00a0 optimist in the sense that I think saving the species and the planet is still a real possibility. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I believe , and I suspect that you believe also, that humanity is now on a collision course with ecological reality and with social reality.\u00a0\u00a0 Human life on this planet is not now sustainable.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

I believe that today there is nearly a consensus worldwide among thinking people that human life is not now sustainable.\u00a0\u00a0 There is no consensus about what to do about it. There is no consensus about the role of the university.<\/p>\n

While I am not alone in thinking that modernity needs to learn from older traditions to make itself sustainable I believe we transformers by enlargement are a minority. We are the people who want to have our cake and eat it too.\u00a0 We think we can keep the benefits of modernity, bureaucracy, and capitalism while achieving the radical transformations that Marxists, ecologists, African revivalists, religious soul-savers, and feminists call for.\u00a0\u00a0 I believe that when the facts are faced in the cold light of reason we will be seen to be a wise minority.\u00a0 We transformers by enlargement, we realistic idealists and idealistic realists,\u00a0 have a solid case to make that can be backed up with facts and logic.<\/p>\n

It follows from my atavistic pessimism that humanity as a whole needs to change its practices.\u00a0 To change its practices it needs to change its thinking.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There are necessary learning processes which have to take place throughout the planet.\u00a0 I call them necessary conversations, I hope that what I will say in the next hour will motivate you, if you are not already motivated, to be a speaker and a listener in necessary conversations.<\/p>\n

When I say necessary I really mean necessary.\u00a0 I do not mean that revising the basic principles of modern civilization is desirable; I mean it is necessary.\u00a0 I have friends who cringe at the very idea of anything pre-modern.\u00a0\u00a0 When they think of pre-modernity they think of patriarchy; they think of dying young from small pox,\u00a0\u00a0 they think of mud houses surrounded by mounds of faeces soaked in urine; they think of mindless superstition and ritual sacrifice of human victims. They like to cite studies that show that over the centuries humans have become more civilized and less violent, and that the tribal peoples idealized by romantics were the most violent of all.[ii]<\/a>\u00a0 And I have friends who adore everything modern.\u00a0 When they think of modernity they think of legalizing marijuana, of gay rights, of a woman\u2019s right to choose, of windsurfing and flying in a jet to the South Seas on a Club Med vacation, they think of clean bathrooms that smell of antiseptic cleansers and of flowered perfumes, of rational social science with full-body massages and life long learning for all.\u00a0 I am not arguing with my friends.\u00a0\u00a0 They may hate everything pre-modern and love everything modern if they want to.\u00a0 But I am saying that modernity is unsustainable.\u00a0\u00a0 However desirable it might be, it cannot possibly last as it is.\u00a0\u00a0 It can survive only by alloying itself with ancient institutions rooted in ancient depths of human nature.<\/p>\n

Let me state telegraphically why I consider this last claim to be true:\u00a0 I refer to the claim that modernity can only survive by alloying itself with ancient institutions rooted in ancient depths of human nature.\u00a0\u00a0 Here goes:\u00a0\u00a0 Modernity requires obedience to the systemic imperatives[iii]<\/a> imposed by the accumulation of profit being the mainspring that to a great extent drives production.\u00a0 Historically and anthropologically, the great alternatives to that mainspring have been the culturally determined behaviours of reciprocity and redistribution that in Africa and elsewhere have made it possible to produce and distribute the necessities of life without undue reliance on investor confidence.[iv]<\/a> It is to greater emphasis on those ancient alternatives that we must turn.\u00a0 We must turn to them because a green, frugal, and less socially unequal future\u00a0 (which is the only possible future) is only possible if we can find ways to violate with\u00a0 impunity the systemic imperatives imposed by regimes of accumulation.[v]<\/a><\/p>\n

Perhaps nobody understood what I just said so telegraphically, but at least I can say I made an effort to state my point succinctly.\u00a0 Let me now resume making my point\u00a0 at greater length.<\/p>\n

It is hard to know what to say next.\u00a0\u00a0 It would be easy to summarize our book,\u00a0\u00a0 Rethinking Thinking, Modernity\u2019s Other and the Transformation of the University. [vi]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I resist summarizing our book for two reasons.\u00a0\u00a0 The first reason is that I want you to read it.\u00a0\u00a0 I am afraid that if I summarize it you will think you already know what it says and will not read it.\u00a0\u00a0 The second reason is that I want to say more.\u00a0\u00a0 I want to double my winnings by both persuading you to read the book and posing additional theses for discussion.<\/p>\n

Before coming I sent your dean an e mail suggesting some ideas I might lead with.\u00a0\u00a0 He suggested that I emphasize implications for the university curriculum and research methodology.\u00a0\u00a0 I will talk about university curriculum.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I will have time to say only a little about research methodology so that topic will have to await another day.<\/p>\n

In any case, the world\u2019s leading expert on the subject of my peculiarities, my wife and partner Caroline, will tell you that however I begin a conversation I always end up talking about Roman Law.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That is what will happen.\u00a0\u00a0 My topic will be the university curriculum, but my subject will be Roman Law.<\/p>\n

Let me not keep you in suspense.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I will tell you right away why I always end up talking about Roman Law.[vii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is because Roman Law, and especially the Roman jus gentium or law of nations is the single most important historical root of the legal framework of the modern world-system.\u00a0\u00a0 It is the root of the basic structure of the global economy.\u00a0 It is where that part of the law known as private law comes from. [viii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Globalisation can be defined as the predominance of private institutions organized by private law over public institutions organized by public law.[ix]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Earlier in my telegraphic summary I spoke of \u201csystemic imperatives.\u201d\u00a0 I want to say that the legal framework of the modern world constitutes the system.\u00a0\u00a0 In constituting the system it constitutes its imperatives.\u00a0 For example, it constitutes the imperative that whatever else a government does it must create a favourable climate for investment.<\/p>\n

Immanuel Wallerstein coined the phrase \u201cmodern world-system.\u201d Wallerstein makes an important point when he says that today there is only one global social system, and only one mode of production.[x]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Everything from the fantasies of the subconscious mind to the physical realities of global warming, has to a large extent been drawn into its vortex.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Its dynamics \u2013most importantly the dynamic (or logic) of accumulation of capital\u2014are made possible and inevitable by the neo-Roman commercial law created in Europe.[xi]<\/a><\/p>\n

Here I can offer at least one suggestion about research methodology:\u00a0 we need a methodology that can study any limited topic as part of the global economy.\u00a0 I suggest that such a methodology focus on its constitutive rules, its basic norms.\u00a0\u00a0 As Caroline said would happen, I am back to Roman Law again, and to the claim that the constitutive rules of the modern world-system are its market-constituting norms of property, person, and contract..<\/p>\n

Edgar Morin has famously said that the university of the future must reorganize itself in the light of the information sciences, because we know today that everything from biology to linguistics, from chemistry to management, is about information; and because today\u00a0 we have learned from systems theory that besides linear causality there is circular causality and recursive causality. [xii]<\/a>\u00a0 Not disagreeing but adding, transforming by enlargement, I am here to tell you that we need to study basic norms, constitutive rules.[xiii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Basic norms are causes of the effects we observe.[xiv]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Key norms that operate today were coded into world legal culture long ago in the Roman Empire whose successor states became Europe.\u00a0\u00a0 Understanding the system in terms of its constitutive rules is a step toward what we need:\u00a0 a methodology that sees the local in the global and the global in the local.<\/p>\n

One can reform the university by bringing in complexity, chaos theory, cybernetics, non-lineal thinking and any number of new paradigms.\u00a0 These do not necessarily make the ethical point I want to stress: norms are causes.\u00a0\u00a0 To change society we must change norms.\u00a0\u00a0 We must change basic norms, and that is why we need to go back to 1488,\u00a0\u00a0 In 1488, and especially in South Africa when the Dutch arrived in 1652,\u00a0 the continent began to be drawn into the whirlpool generated by markets.\u00a0 The markets themselves were in turn generated by the legal norms that constituted them..<\/p>\n

This brings me back to where I said I would begin, for as Africa starting in 1488 was drawn into the all-swallowing whirlpool of the global economy,\u00a0 so the university curriculum has also been drawn into the same whirlpool.\u00a0\u00a0 My watery metaphor,\u00a0 the whirlpool, refers to patterns of social conduct organized is by rules, namely the rules that constitute markets.<\/p>\n

I will propose for discussion two theses about the university in the whirlpool of the global economy; one about how the European university whirled into Africa, and a second about where the university is whirling today.<\/p>\n

If we think of the idea of a university as beginning with the founding of Plato\u2019s academy, as I propose we should, then the institution called university that the Europeans brought to Africa already had seeds of pre-modern African wisdom in the cultural coding of its own history.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Plato studied in Egypt and drew his foundational ideas from African sources.\u00a0 Enlarging the university curriculum by including its pre-modern African other might be called going back to the origins of the academy as a human institution.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But right now I am not going back that far in history.\u00a0\u00a0 I am only going back to the founding of the University of South Africa in 1873, of the University of Cape Town in 1829, and generally to the colonialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries.<\/p>\n

My first thesis about the university is that European-style education at the university level, as well as at the primary and secondary levels, came to Africa as part and parcel of a project of modernization, which in turn was part of the global expansion of the European world-system.\u00a0 The founding of universities was inseparable from the imposition of the juridical framework of European commerce on Africa.<\/p>\n

Now I will try to define modernization, or what amounts to the same thing, to define modernity.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The sub-title of Rethinking Thinking already says that our book is about modernity\u2019s other, about what is not modern.\u00a0\u00a0 My co author Professor Catherine Hoppers and I are advocating bringing modernity\u2019s other into the university to transform it.\u00a0\u00a0 So what is modernity and where did it come from?[xv]<\/a><\/p>\n

We follow Max Weber in identifying modernity first of all although on a rather superficial level with capitalism and bureaucracy.[xvi]<\/a>\u00a0 Weber also famously identified modernization with a certain kind of rationality that he called Zweckrationalit\u00e4t, purposive rationality,\u00a0 or goal-oriented rationality. Zweck is a German word for goal or aim or objective.\u00a0\u00a0 I do not think the idea of Zweck is adequately communicated by its usual translation into English as \u201cinstrumental rationality.\u201d\u00a0 The underlying idea is that modern people choose an objective and then figure out the most efficient way to achieve the objective.\u00a0\u00a0 Pre-modern people are said to follow customary rituals and norms.\u00a0\u00a0 Weber himself says that the most epoch-making form of this rationality was capitalism, where the goal is profit and rationality consists of pursuing it efficiently.<\/p>\n

Weber also famously argued that a certain type of puritanical protestant first adopted this characteristically capitalistic rationality by feeling inwardly compelled to adopt an ascetic lifestyle;\u00a0 the first capitalists\u00a0 rationally calculated how to accumulate a maximum of wealth by ploughing\u00a0 profits back into business instead of spending them having fun.\u00a0\u00a0 According to Weber the first capitalists were driven by their faith to accumulate capital instead of enjoying worldly pleasures.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But few people believe Weber on this point today.\u00a0 It is far-fetched to say that capitalism began as an offshoot of puritanical religion.<\/p>\n

Weber also made another point I find more important and more believable.\u00a0\u00a0 It was that before capital accumulation could get off the ground there had to be a legal system of the Roman type.[xvii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Nobody can invest money for the purpose of getting more money back if there is no legal system establishing property rights and enforcing contracts. [xviii]<\/a><\/p>\n

Let me next apply these Weberian thoughts to the European project of modernizing Africa.\u00a0 I treat the European conquest and colonizing of Africa as a project in two senses.\u00a0 First, Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Rosa Luxembourg, and many other authors show how Europe was driven by its own capitalist dynamics to project its system onto a global level.\u00a0 Europe was inherently unstable, then as now.\u00a0\u00a0 It could only stabilize itself by continually incorporating into its system what Luxembourg called \u201cnatural economies.\u201d [xix]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Second the Europeans subjectively believed that they were undertaking the project of civilizing the rest of the world.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I would like to suggest for discussion the thesis that bringing \u201ccivilization\u201d to the rest of the world, as the European colonialists understood it, featured and emphasized establishing in the rest of the world a legal framework of the kind required by a market economy.[xx]<\/a><\/p>\n

Let us apply this point to property rights in land in South Africa.\u00a0\u00a0 The San people, sometimes called Bushmen, inhabited what is now South Africa from very ancient times.\u00a0 Skeleton remains similar to those of San people have been dated as coming from the Upper Palaeolithic period.[xxi]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Khoi people came later and interrelated so much that one today often refers to the Khoisan as a general grouping that can be divided into several subgroups.\u00a0 Experts differ concerning when the numerous peoples speaking Bantu[xxii]<\/a> languages arrived, some giving dates as early as 300 A.D. others as late as 600 A. D.[xxiii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is in any event clear that both when the Bantu peoples were displacing the Bushmen and when Bantus were fighting other Bantus, Zulus against Tshwanes for example, there were any number of wars in which one Bantu or San people took land from another.[xxiv]<\/a>\u00a0 After the Dutch arrived in addition to the fighting between Dutch and English, whites gradually over the next few centuries seized by violence the greater part of the land previously held by black people, in notable cases massacring defenceless blacks who had no modern weapons.[xxv]<\/a><\/p>\n

The point I want to make is that the land-grabbing by violence of the Europeans had characteristics that earlier forms of land-grabbing by violence did not have.\u00a0 It was not simply a matter of a different tribal group speaking a different language seizing land by force of arms.\u00a0 This time there was a modernization project that brought Roman Law principles to Africa.\u00a0 The land was measured.\u00a0\u00a0 Paper deeds were recorded assigning ownership to individuals.\u00a0 Land became a commodity that could be bought and sold.\u00a0\u00a0 Now it was not the Dutch (starting in 1652) as a tribe or the English as a tribe who owned the land, but individual Dutchmen or Englishmen.\u00a0 Land could also be owned by legal fictions, by partnerships and by artificial persons called corporations.\u00a0 Conquest by Europeans meant that collective ownership and collective responsibility lost out to individualism \u2013not just as a matter of change of attitude, but as a matter of normative principle enforced by law.[xxvi]<\/a><\/p>\n

If one goes back far enough in the history of Rome\u00a0 –I am talking about 500 to 800 years before Christ \u2013 one will find that property rights in land in the most ancient Rome were similar to those in Bantu Africa before the Europeans arrived.\u00a0\u00a0 Land was held by tribes.\u00a0 Tribes were organized by kinship.\u00a0 Everybody who was born was born into one clan or another.\u00a0\u00a0 Since land was owned by groups and everyone was in a group everyone had access to land. [xxvii]<\/a><\/p>\n

As Roman Law began to evolve in Rome itself both land and other forms of property, including women, animals, and slaves, came to be defined not as property of a tribe but as property of a particular father figure who was also the military leader of a small fiefdom he dominated, the\u00a0 paterfamilias.\u00a0\u00a0 The word for property was dominium and it meant \u201cthat which was conquered.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 In Rome several centuries before Christ there began socially constructed realities that did not begin in Africa until 1488.\u00a0\u00a0 One of those Roman socially constructed realities was the proletariat.\u00a0\u00a0 Proletariat in its original Latin meaning refers to people who had no land.\u00a0\u00a0 Another was the plebeian.\u00a0\u00a0 The word \u201cplebeian\u201d originally referred to people who belonged to no tribe.<\/p>\n

If today we find it normal to see millions who own no land and belong to no tribe it is not because a thousand years ago these things were normal here on the land where Cape Town is built.\u00a0 It is because institutions born in Rome have been implanted here.\u00a0\u00a0 They have been implanted everywhere.[xxviii]<\/a><\/p>\n

I suggest for discussion that the university curricula established in Africa were part and parcel of a modernization project.\u00a0\u00a0 Education was part and parcel of the establishment in Africa of European neo-Roman justice.\u00a0\u00a0 European justice meant creating the legal foundations of a market economy.\u00a0 I and others have described in some detail how the typical academic subjects, mathematics, physics, economics, history, social science generally, literature and languages, functioned as manifestations and justifications of a modern worldview. [xxix]<\/a>\u00a0 Africa acquired a professional elite with a modern mentality.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While the university instilled a modern worldview,\u00a0\u00a0 it also provided technical training for putting modernity into practice in engineering, accountancy, and other practical subjects.<\/p>\n

I also propose for discussion the thesis that today university education is losing its ideological commitment to modern liberal ideals.\u00a0\u00a0 The university is becoming a part of a project of economic development.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Universities train human resources for the labour market.\u00a0 They balance their budgets by selling research to businesses and governments.\u00a0 The university is becoming part of what Francis Fukuyama called the end of history.\u00a0 According to Fukuyama\u2019s famous book, history is over.\u00a0 He defines history as the competition of socio-economic systems.[xxx]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The competition is over.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A single world-wide socio-economic system that he calls free market democracy dominates the present and will dominate the future.<\/p>\n

In an end-of-history scenario, the university is no longer needed to create a professional elite with a modern mentality. The mentalities of every stratum of society have already been modernized.\u00a0 Individualism has become the common-sense of the masses.\u00a0\u00a0 The university works within the established order.\u00a0\u00a0 It adds value to human resources.<\/p>\n

Although not everyone will agree with the thesis I am advancing for discussion, and although many believe that the most pressing issues in education should be identified differently, I suggest that the trend toward making the university a supplier of educated labour power for the economy can be seen in facts anybody can ascertain and confirm.<\/p>\n

The trend is seen in the reforms subordinating higher education to economics associated with the Bologna process.[xxxi]<\/a>\u00a0 If we continue in the direction we are going the great majority of the people in tomorrow\u2019s knowledge societies will be trained in universities designed as technical training institutes working closely with business and industry.\u00a0\u00a0 What the technical training institutes will teach will be planned to dovetail with what employers will require.\u00a0 This news is not all bad because to a considerable extent what employers will require in a knowledge economy will be flexible and empowered thinkers, and lifelong learning to keep up with their constantly changing specialties.[xxxii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The great traditional universities will continue to exist, but they are being transformed into research universities whose function is to produce marketable knowledge.\u00a0\u00a0 Like any other business they have to sell to balance their books, and like any other business they hire marketing experts to sell their products, namely degrees and research.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They are increasingly evaluated by their patents, by their publications in specialized peer-reviewed journals, and in the last analysis by their contributions to global competitiveness.\u00a0 Chris Lorenz expressed a pessimism I find half convincing when he wrote, \u201cThe ideology of the knowledge economy thus simply means that the domain of knowledge production is economized; homo academicus is modelled after homo economicus.\u00a0 Capitalist economy no longer finds its legitimization in scientific terms, as was the case in \u2018late capitalism\u2019 according to the influential diagnosis of J\u00fcrgen Habermas[xxxiii]<\/a> because science itself now needs to justify itself in economic terms.\u201d[xxxiv]<\/a><\/p>\n

Further verification for my second thesis can be found by visiting the website of the University of South Africa.\u00a0\u00a0 If you enter as a prospective student the first question you are asked is in effect, \u201cWhat job do you want to apply for?\u201d\u00a0 You are then led to information about the university course you need to study to qualify for the job you want.<\/p>\n

I fear that in attempting to be clear I am falling into being misleading.\u00a0\u00a0 Among the thousands of universities in the world there is enormous diversity.\u00a0 Many do things I\u00a0 and my co-authors recommend, such as incorporating traditional wisdom in the curriculum,\u00a0 inventing the green technologies of the future,\u00a0 nurturing emotional intelligence,\u00a0 training social entrepreneurs,\u00a0 teaching non-profit and cooperative management,\u00a0 \u2026 and so on.\u00a0\u00a0 Further, it is not our intention to discourage useful research that has practical applications that are profitable.\u00a0\u00a0 Our aim is to broaden minds, not to narrow them.<\/p>\n

I want to say, and I suspect that you already agree with me and I do not need to persuade you, that both the colonial university and today\u2019s university are built on false premises. The modernizing university of yesterday tended to embrace a false premise of cultural superiority, treating European modernity as the bearer of civilization while others had merely culture, as the bearer of knowledge while others had merely beliefs.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Among the false premises of today\u2019s higher education I would single out a tendency to believe that the economy will generate enough jobs to employ all or most graduates.[xxxv]<\/a><\/p>\n

But before detailing reasons why universities are now founded on falsity, on illusions, on what is not instead of on what is, I want to reclaim the meaning of the word.\u00a0 I want to say that the very meaning of the word \u201cuniversity\u201d as it has developed through the ages has included a commitment to unbounded inquiry.\u00a0\u00a0 The principle of Plato\u2019s mentor Socrates, \u201cThe only thing that I know is that I know nothing\u201d is the founding principle of the academy.\u00a0\u00a0 It is central to the ideals that historically gave birth to the university.<\/p>\n

Let me trace that history little bit.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Plato had learned in Egypt that there is authority higher than the human mind.\u00a0\u00a0 He elaborated that idea in his dialogues.\u00a0 Plato\u2019s dialogues were about logical argument as submission to the logos, submission to reason wherever it takes us.\u00a0\u00a0 In the Middle Ages the first institutions to bear the name \u201cuniversity\u201d centred on scholarly debates in which different opinions confronted each other, were weighed, and were evaluated.\u00a0\u00a0 The ideological heavy artillery of early modernity deployed by the likes of Rene Descartes,\u00a0 Sir Isaac Newton,\u00a0 Newton\u2019s disciple John Locke,\u00a0 Newton\u2019s disciple Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant who declared both Newton\u2019s physics and Ulpian\u2019s synthesis of Roman Law to be eternal and universal conditions of any possible experience — whew, this sentence is getting long.\u00a0\u00a0 What I want to say is that the \u201cnew Logick\u201d that took over Oxford, Cambridge, Paris and one by one all the world\u2019s major universities in early modern times defeated the scholastics of the Middle Ages by arguing that scholasticism was unfaithful to the Socratic tradition of free inquiry.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The true spirit of science,\u00a0 the spirit that (in the words of David Hume) declares that the best guarantee that what I say is true is a standing\u00a0 invitation to all the world to prove it false,\u00a0 required \u2013the early moderns argued–\u00a0 a modern university and not a medieval university.\u00a0 What the early moderns reclaimed was the Socratic heritage.\u00a0\u00a0 I recommend reclaiming that heritage today.\u00a0 I recommend insisting today that whatever an institution not open to untrammelled inquiry that doubts all premises and questions all alleged facts may be it is not a university.\u00a0 \u201cScience is rooted in the will to truth,\u201d Max Wertheimer wrote. \u201cWith the will to truth it stands or falls.\u00a0 Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core.\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point in history I need not argue that European disregard for indigenous knowledge systems, norms, and values was an ethical and scientific mistake.\u00a0 Most people are already convinced and do not need to be persuaded.\u00a0\u00a0 Regarding my first thesis, the one about yesterday\u2019s modernizing university,\u00a0 the question to be asked\u00a0 is\u00a0 how universities still rooted in the presuppositions of a nineteenth century liberal world order could transform themselves to be ethically constructive and scientifically honest today.\u00a0\u00a0 In other words, what could be the rationale of a university that deep in its institutional heart wants to carry forward the ideals of the Enlightenment, a university that is not content to be simply a supplier of human resources for the labour market, but which realizes that the ideals it would have liked to carry forward, i.e. those of European modernity, are no longer intellectually defensible?<\/p>\n

I suggest two answers to the question: the first is ecology. (conceived as a synthesis of the findings of the natural sciences); the second is an application of Weber\u2019s Gemeinschaft\/Gesellschaft distinction.<\/p>\n

Although there are certainly many dubious claims and hotly contested issues in ecology, I nevertheless propose it as a normative and scientific framework that provides a rationale for a university.\u00a0\u00a0 Ecology writes a common story that can unite all members of a human family living in a common home, the planet earth.[xxxvi]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Ecology defines the conditions that socially constructed realities need to satisfy to be sustainable.\u00a0\u00a0 By definition ecology synthesizes the natural sciences, and in so doing it defines the context of the human sciences.[xxxvii]<\/a>\u00a0 A university with an ecological rationale is no longer simply a servant of the market, because the performance of markets can itself be judged according to a standard independent of markets \u2013namely physical reality.<\/p>\n

Let me explain now how Weber\u2019s Gemeinschaft\/Gesellschaft\u00a0 distinction also suggests a rationale for a future university.\u00a0 I assume that a future university, unlike yesterday\u2019s modernizing university does not set out to destroy some cultures and impose others; it sets out tot honour every culture.<\/p>\n

Weber in his methodological writings gave a rather broader definition of Gemeinschaft than those associated with his predecessors and colleagues Ferdinand T\u00f6nnies, Georg Simmel, and Werner Sombart.\u00a0 For Weber it means community in the elemental sense that people have human relationships with each other.\u00a0 Relationships are human when and only when people can rely on reasonable expectations regarding how other people will behave.\u00a0\u00a0 At every place in the world and at every time in history every clan, tribe, group, family, or organization is a Gemeinschaft.\u00a0\u00a0 Human behaviour in general is Gemeinschafthandlung.\u00a0\u00a0 Modern society is a particular kind of Gemeinschaft, namely a Gesellschaft; modernity is a Gemeinschaft\u00a0\u00a0 characterized by instrumentally rational behaviour, capitalism, bureaucracy, and a Roman-type legal framework.\u00a0\u00a0 Weber calls modernity Gesellschaft not because it is distinct from Gemeinschaft but because by definition it is a special kind of Gemeinschaft.<\/p>\n

My second suggestion is that the relationship between modern culture and other cultures, explained in Weber\u2019s terms or in some similar terms, be made clear in the curriculum.\u00a0 Now we know that Europe\u2019s is certainly not the only civilization, and probably not the best civilization.\u00a0 Let the curriculum correct the mistake.\u00a0\u00a0 This mistake is no doubt already corrected for students of anthropology and archaeology, and for most students of sociology and of history.\u00a0\u00a0 The point should be made clear to the much larger numbers of students who study management, public administration, education, economics, accounting, politics, international relations, engineering, the natural sciences, mathematics, information technology, law, and the health sciences.<\/p>\n

I suggest for your consideration a new founding myth, or metanarrative, for the university.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I mean to suggest that, given that universities are about the production and distribution of knowledge,\u00a0 a community story or organizing myth that defines knowledge will orient the university.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If one believes, as the founders of the first university (Bologna 1088) believed, and as many still believe, that God is the source and goal of truth, that view of knowledge will have implications for every aspect of the university. [xxxviii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If,\u00a0 on the other hand one believes,\u00a0 as Immanuel Kant believed,\u00a0 that the progress of reason is destined to lead to freedom and justice for all,\u00a0 that modern creed implies a different university.[xxxix]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Suppose, however, that one regards knowledge as a commodity, truth as what sells[xl]<\/a>;\u00a0 then, I suggest, we are approaching the problems most crucial for the university today.[xli]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 As a contribution to solving those problems I propose\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 for tomorrow\u2019s university the critical realist[xlii]<\/a> philosophy that knowledge is simultaneously plural and grounded in physical reality;\u00a0 humanity consists of diverse cultural communities with diverse knowledges;\u00a0\u00a0 each community and each knowledge must necessarily cope in some way or other with physical reality.<\/p>\n

But proposing a new metanarrative for education is not my main point.\u00a0 It is my brief\u00a0 suggested answer to yesterday\u2019s question how a university that can no longer sustain faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment can find a mission it can believe in.<\/p>\n

My main point is a series of suggestions for answering today\u2019s question.\u00a0 How can we transform a university that is tending to become an instrument of economic development? and tending toward the relative neglect of its other functions?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To propose an answer I begin with a general principle of cultural transformation:\u00a0 Not every cultural transformation is possible.\u00a0\u00a0 The possible transformations start from a firm grounding in the culture that already exists. [xliii]<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is a firm grounding in the culture that already exists:\u00a0 Universities are already asking themselves the question, \u201cHow can we assure that our graduates will find employment?\u201d\u00a0 The answers they are giving to that question are already diverse.\u00a0 Some universities, Harvard for example, promote an entrepreneurial spirit.\u00a0 Harvard students are told:\u00a0 Don\u2019t wait for someone to offer you a job; create your own job.\u00a0 A Harvard student who took that advice was Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.\u00a0 At the famous graduate school of management founded by Peter Drucker in California the admissions policy is that forty percent of the students should come from the public and non-profit sectors.\u00a0\u00a0 At Buckingham University in the UK students learn to be social entrepreneurs, learning how to raise money for causes, how to make a living while changing the world.\u00a0 Many other examples could be cited.\u00a0 These are examples of livelihoods with different logics.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They are logics different from the logic of finding employment with an employer who makes a profit from selling the product of your labour.\u00a0\u00a0 Universities are already edging toward the concept of a plural economy, that is to say an economy with plural logics, is possible and necessary.<\/p>\n

A plural economy is already happening and universities are already part of it.\u00a0 If I am right that today\u2019s universities tend to justify themselves by the economic roles they play, then a path to transformation may be to suggest new economic roles:\u00a0 namely those that contribute to building a plural and green economy.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am trying to avoid talking in the air about an abstract theory, and to propose augmenting tendencies that exist, are growing, and can grow much more.<\/p>\n

I will now offer a theoretical rationale for a plural economy.\u00a0 I will explain why this rationale can help the university renew faith in itself as an institution devoted to free inquiry in pursuit of what Plato called \u201cthe good.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I will explain why a plural economy can get the human species off the path to doomsday it is currently on.\u00a0\u00a0 I will explain why to build\u00a0 an economy plural enough to achieve this great goal, which is nothing less than saving humanity and the biosphere,\u00a0 we need to go back to 1488 and reconsider modernity itself.<\/p>\n

A key theoretical point leading to making a case for a plural economy and for learning from pre-modernity turns on an issue that has been hotly debated in the history of economics.\u00a0 Joseph Schumpeter in his exhaustive History of Economic Analysis frames the issue in terms of hitch economists vs. hitchless economists.[xliv]<\/a>\u00a0 Adam Smith was a great founder of the tradition of hitchless economics.\u00a0 Smith held that nobody wanted money for its own sake; money was desired only for the sake of what it could buy.\u00a0\u00a0 Smith held that the more people saved the better.\u00a0\u00a0 Saving was what made employment possible; saving provided the capital for keeping workers alive during the time while the work was incomplete and no product could be sold.\u00a0 Therefore, according to Smith, the more saving the more employment.\u00a0 The number of workers is a function of the number and wealth of capitalists who have saved enough to stake workers to grub long enough to make a product that can be sold.\u00a0 Smith was a hitchless economist.\u00a0 An early hitch economist was Thomas Malthus, who held that there could be (and often was) an oversupply of capital, an oversupply of labour, and a general glut of goods that were produced but could not be sold for lack of customers[xlv]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In more recent times John Maynard Keynes has been the great hitch economist.\u00a0 He held that people do indeed seek money if not for its own sake then for a series of reasons that make it convenient for them to hold cash instead of spending it.\u00a0\u00a0 People and firms have what Keynes called a liquidity preference. People in the aggregate do not spend all their money, and therefore people with goods to sell do not sell all their goods,\u00a0\u00a0 and therefore the workers they might hire to make more goods if they could sell them are not hired. [xlvi]<\/a> According to the hitch economists, hitchless economists mistakenly believe it is normal for an economy to reach equilibrium with employment for everyone willing to work at the equilibrium wage, i.e. at the price of labour fixed by the market.\u00a0 In reality, as Keynes showed, full employment rarely happens, and when it does happen it does not last long.[xlvii]<\/a><\/p>\n

The hitchless economists fought back against Keynes with a series of theoretical arguments and empirical studies purporting to show among other things that full employment is indeed normal.\u00a0 When it fails to happen it is for some special reason like, for example, wages being too high, the education system producing skills that are not needed instead of skills that are needed, trade unions pricing labour out of the market, and ill-advised government intervention in the economy.<\/p>\n

As it turned out the hitchless economists won political influence in the decade 1970-1980 when the age of Keynes came to an end and the age of neoliberalism began.\u00a0 The reasons why Keynesianism went out and neoliberalism came in did not bear directly on the hitch vs. hitchless issue.\u00a0\u00a0 They had to do with inflation, stagnation, and the political victories of figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.\u00a0\u00a0 As a by-product of mounting evidence that Keynsesians were wrong on other issues, and of voters turning to conservative candidates,\u00a0 it transpired that the economists who advised the powerful and in many cases were themselves the powerful were the economists who believed that full employment was normal.[xlviii]<\/a><\/p>\n

Consequently universities have not been operating in an atmosphere where conventional wisdom finds it imperative to change the basic rules of a society where unemployment is massive and endemic.\u00a0 Universities by and large have been part of the neoliberal consensus.\u00a0 They have tended to think that the problem is to educate people in the skills the job market requires. The conventional wisdom has tended to be that if the graduates cannot find jobs then they must have studied the wrong curriculum and taken the wrong degree; for example there are too many lawyers and not enough IT specialists.\u00a0 Or maybe too many in university and too few in tertiary level technical schools.\u00a0 The prevailing ideas of neoliberal orthodoxy encourage responsiveness to the requirements of the knowledge society and in general responsiveness to global trends in the labour market, but they do not encourage universities to assume responsibility for helping to transform a world where there is a general glut of workers and a general dearth of jobs.[xlix]<\/a><\/p>\n

To abbreviate many books and countless articles in academic journals, I commend the conclusions of Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize laureate in economics for 2008.\u00a0\u00a0 In his recent book The Return of Depression Economics Krugman analyzes the series of financial crises that have broken out in the world economy since 1990. [l]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 His conclusion is that the empirical evidence now conclusively shows that Keynes was right.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hitchless theories are no longer intellectually defensible.\u00a0\u00a0 Consequently educational planning that assumes that hitchless theories are true is not defensible.<\/p>\n

In another recent book John Bellamy and Fred Magdoff make a similar point in Marxist terms.[li]<\/a>\u00a0 Marx famously held that \u201cthe great barrier to capital is capital itself.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 A series of writers in his tradition have in recent decades shown in great detail the chronic stagnation of mature economies such as the USA, Japan, and the European Union.\u00a0\u00a0 It follows that a university whose rationale is its contribution to economic development, where \u201ceconomic development\u201d means becoming more and more like the USA, Japan, and the European Union is a university without a defensible rationale.<\/p>\n

My co-authors and I go a step farther.[lii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 If we take another look at Keynes\u2019 liquidity preference, or at Marxist accounts of chronic overproduction manifesting contradictions in the system that can only be temporarily patched up but never resolved, or indeed if we look at economic argument in general mainstream, rightwing, or leftwing, we will find that the analysis depends on the assumption that we are working within the legal framework of a market economy. In other words stagnation and chronic unemployment inevitably happen in institutions historically derived mainly from Roman Law.\u00a0\u00a0 As Keynes remarks in his General Theory his pessimistic conclusions follow within the institutional framework of a modern economy.\u00a0 Keynes specifies that in a different institutional framework his pessimistic conclusions would not follow.[liii]<\/a><\/p>\n

The institutional framework of modernity, Weber\u2019s Gesellschaft,\u00a0 is already changing,\u00a0 Indeed the reality of modernity was never as clear and simple as Adam Smith\u2019s or Milton Friedman\u2019s or Keynes\u2019 or Marx\u2019s economic theory.\u00a0\u00a0 To appreciate the diversity of economic reality we have to rely more on anthropologists and historians than on economists; I have in mind particularly the \u201csubstantivist\u201d anthropologists influenced by Karl Polanyi and the Annales historians among whom the most famous is probably Fernand Braudel.\u00a0\u00a0 The logic of hiring people to do the work needed to produce goods to be sold at prices sufficient to cover costs and also allow a profit margin is only one logic.\u00a0 It is the logic Smith, Marx, Keynes, and Friedman analyzed.\u00a0\u00a0 But in the real world people gain their livelihoods through a series of different logics.<\/p>\n

Well, let\u2019s look at institutional frameworks different from the constitutive rules of modernity.\u00a0 There is no better place to look than at Africa before European contact.<\/p>\n

Numerous anthropological and historical studies show that before European contact the dominant logics governing the livelihoods of the people of Africa were not capitalist.\u00a0 Before 1488 Africans were much more self-reliant, not in the sense of individuals being self-reliant but in the sense of extended families being self-reliant. [liv]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 In Polanyi\u2019s terminology, the prevailing logics governing exchange among clans were mostly logics of reciprocity and logics of redistribution.\u00a0\u00a0 An example of reciprocity would be the arrangement reported by Bronislaw Malinowski whereby coastal clans traditionally provided ritual gifts of fish to inland clans, which traditionally provided ritual gifts of grains and vegetables to coastal clans.[lv]<\/a>\u00a0 An example of redistribution would be the ancient Egyptian practice of gathering harvested grains into the Pharaoh\u2019s granaries, from where they were redistributed to the people during the long months before the next harvest.[lvi]<\/a><\/p>\n

I do not have time to make the detailed argument, but I will tell you my conclusion, or rather our conclusion, that of me and my co-authors.\u00a0\u00a0 The conclusion is that although cooperatives, public sector enterprises, microcredit for micro-enterprises, family enterprises, and employee-owned enterprises are key parts of a plural economy, they alone will not include everybody.\u00a0 The reason is that they all depend on sales.\u00a0\u00a0 As Krugman has recently shown in detail, Keynes was right.\u00a0 There really is a chronic weakness of effective demand; theoretically, it is a consequence of the liquidity preference; empirically, it is the verdict of history.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To return to the level of inclusion that was lost after 1488 as society became less organized by kinship and more organized by markets, it is necessary to have livelihoods that do not depend on sales.<\/p>\n

I wish I could avoid discussing capitalism; I even wish the very word would go away.\u00a0\u00a0 But even though it is a difficult and controversial concept, and even though one almost inevitably loses friends when one talks about it, it is necessary to define it and to think about it.\u00a0\u00a0 We cannot find a way forward for humanity and the earth without examining the rules that govern us and it.\u00a0\u00a0 Those rules are to a large extent the rules of capitalism.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have already said that we are on a collision course with ecological and social reality, and I have already promised to show how the restoration of ancient African norms would make it possible to change course and save our species and our planet.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Now I need to explain more of what I mean.\u00a0\u00a0 I will undertake the dangerous and vital task of defining capitalism.\u00a0\u00a0 From its very definition will flow the reasons why Karl Marx was correct when he said it was both the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My wager is that if we can succeed in understanding it we can succeed in fixing it. .\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Later I will say a little bit about how plural economy ideas are being put into practice here and now.\u00a0\u00a0 I mean particularly the plural economy idea of including the formerly excluded by paying them for doing useful work, but not making their livelihoods dependent on finding buyers for their products.\u00a0\u00a0 The hitch economists, who are the only economists who are intellectually respectable today in the light of the empirical evidence, know from theory and from history that buyers tend to be scarce.<\/p>\n

But even before I begin defining capitalism I need to draw an implication for the university curriculum and for research from the very fact that I am about to discuss it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am beginning a discussion, and certainly only beginning it because nobody can pretend to say all that needs to be said on the topic, that already implies that history is not over.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This has implications for the university.\u00a0\u00a0 If history is over, then there is nothing for the university to do but to contribute to the socio-economic system that has triumphed and will continue to triumph as long as there are human beings on this planet \u2013which will be at most a few centuries if my pessimism is correct, for according to my pessimism the presently triumphant system makes not just human life but also the biosphere in general unsustainable.<\/p>\n

If, on the other hand, we are going to discuss the role of capitalism in a plural economy we are implying that history is not over.\u00a0 There is still research to be done evaluating the performance of human institutions because we still do not know what set of institutions works best at any given time and place.\u00a0\u00a0 Much less do we know what the prevailing economic orthodoxy seems to claim to know:\u00a0 what set of institutions works best at all times and all places.\u00a0 There is still a place for educated reflection on social and economic systems.\u00a0 There is still a place for research methodologies that move the parameters dustbowl empiricism takes as unmoveable; for example for Vygotskyan educational research that moves variables of history and culture that are never seen, much less questioned,\u00a0 in the educational research Kurt Lewin praised as \u201cGalilean.\u201d\u00a0 When we discuss and evaluate capitalism,\u00a0 rather than simply taking it as a given,\u00a0 the traditional university claiming allegiance to the ideal of free and independent inquiry bearing on the big issues Plato called \u201cthe premises of the sciences,\u201d \u201cjustice,\u201d and \u201cthe good\u201d still has a role to play in society.<\/p>\n

Let me begin by discussing two common kinds of definitions capitalism.\u00a0\u00a0 Later I will state my own.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To the best of my knowledge the concept and word \u201ccapitalism\u201d was coined by Karl Marx.\u00a0 I read him as meaning three things by the term: namely free alienability of labour, commodity production for private accumulation of wealth, and sufficient accumulation of wealth to enable industrialization. [lvii]<\/a><\/p>\n

In contrast, Francis Fukuyama, in a move typical of conservative advocates of capitalism identifies it with allocation of resources by competitive pricing.[lviii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 This sort of definition already implies a definition of socialism:\u00a0 namely, central planning.\u00a0\u00a0 It is already understood that competitive pricing requires widely dispersed private ownership, while central planning requires highly concentrated public ownership.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For Fukuyama socialism is definitely out of the running from here on out because although central planning had some limited feasibility for basic industrialization, it is completely not feasible for today\u2019s knowledge society.<\/p>\n

As is usual with important essentially contested concepts how you define the concept depends on what you want to do with it.\u00a0 What I want to do with\u00a0 capitalism is preserve its dynamic capacity to create levels of innovation and productivity not known before in human history, while leaving behind what I have pessimistically called humanity\u2019s march toward social and ecological doomsday.\u00a0\u00a0 For my purposes Fukuyama\u2019s definition simply muddies the water.<\/p>\n

Let me explain why the common identification of capitalism with markets and competitive pricing muddies the water.\u00a0\u00a0 First, such a concept does not describe reality.\u00a0\u00a0 Most markets have elements of monopoly,\u00a0 oligopoly,\u00a0 barriers to entry,\u00a0 differentiation of products by creative marketing,\u00a0 follow-up sales tied to earlier sales, brand loyalty, and so on;\u00a0 indeed in practice businesses do everything they can to avoid being in fully competitive markets, and when in spite of their best efforts they fall into price wars with numerous competitors their profit margins tend to fall and they tend to disappear. [lix]<\/a><\/p>\n

While a competitive pricing definition of capitalism does not define reality, it also does not define an ideal.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Scholars enamoured of mathematical equilibrium models are likely to describe any variation from competitive pricing as an imperfection, and to advocate reforming capitalism to make it true to its own ideal by making it more competitive.\u00a0\u00a0 But this is a false ideal.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 First, allocating resources by price competition in markets is not a desirable ideal because as Amartya Sen has repeatedly insisted, the market is one institution among others that serves the cause of human development.[lx]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 It is not the only one, and often it is not the best one.\u00a0\u00a0 Secondly, it is not a realizable ideal.\u00a0\u00a0 Most businesses that succeed are successful because they do not conform to the theoretical ideal of being in markets with numerous sellers who compete with each other by cutting costs to the bone and\u00a0 beating the competition by lowering prices to the lowest possible level.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Let\u2019s wake up to the real world.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If we are going to have a thriving private sector, private firms must have decent profit margins, and they cannot have them by conforming to the theoretical ideal of fully competitive markets. [lxi]<\/a><\/p>\n

I suggest that the function of definitions like those given by advocates of capitalism like Francis Fukuyama and Ludwig von Mises is to refute socialism.\u00a0\u00a0 If you define capitalism as markets with competitive pricing, and if you then define socialism as its opposite,\u00a0 central planning of an entire economy,\u00a0 then it is easy to prove that capitalism is better than socialism, both on logical grounds and on grounds of historical experience.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Such definitions are useful for political polemics, but they are not useful for anything else, since they do not describe reality; they do not prescribe a desirable ideal, and they do not prescribe a realizable ideal.<\/p>\n

I have already suggested that Marx has a parental right to define capitalism since he was the one who coined the word.\u00a0\u00a0 Nevertheless his way of using the concept requires amendment because it is enmeshed in a general view of history that is in many ways valuable but in others misleading.[lxii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Marx somewhat under the influence of Hegel tended to view history as marching through a series of logical stages.\u00a0 I think it is more realistic to say that history mushrooms every which way, with no logical pattern except under special circumstances such as, to cite my main example, the patterns created by the imposition of Roman Law principles throughout the planet.[lxiii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 In particular, Marx sometimes (but not\u00a0 always)\u00a0 seemed to think that\u00a0 free labour was part of the definition of capitalism, and that capitalism so defined was a prerequisite for industrialization. [lxiv]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 It is now clear,\u00a0 however,\u00a0 that industrialization is possible with slave labour.\u00a0\u00a0 Also, as Marx did not anticipate in theory but as some of his followers have shown in practice,\u00a0 industrialization is possible with public rather than private accumulation of capital.<\/p>\n

I will go with the second of what I have called (following Cohen)\u00a0 three elements of a Marxian definition:\u00a0 namely capitalism is commodity production for private accumulation of wealth.\u00a0 It is the definition Marx most emphasizes, for at the beginning of Capital he says his book will be about that kind of society whose wealth appears as a vast collection of commodities.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the original German the word translated \u201ccommodities\u201d is Waren, that is to say wares, products to be sold.\u00a0 Capitalism, then is investing money to make products in order to sell them for profit.[lxv]<\/a>\u00a0 If one ignores the middle of the process\u00a0 (i.e. if one ignores making the products and selling them) capitalism is investing money to get more money; it is the logic of accumulation of capital.\u00a0\u00a0 But I do not advise ignoring the middle:\u00a0\u00a0 As Peter Drucker has emphasized, producing something useful and marketing it are the concrete human objectives served by the abstract numbers on the account books.\u00a0 Society would have no good reason to tolerate a so-called capitalism that merely turned cash into more cash while doing no useful work.[lxvi]<\/a><\/p>\n

I would like to point out that my definition of capitalism, which is similar to Marx\u2019s and to Drucker\u2019s,\u00a0 is already a giant step toward acknowledging the existence of a plural economy, and therefore a giant step toward redefining the university\u2019s role in economic development.\u00a0 Here\u2019s why.\u00a0\u00a0 It is because in Africa as in Latin America the majority of employment is not provided by capitalism so-defined.\u00a0\u00a0 Quite apart from the public sector, cooperatives, non-profits and other third sectors, in Africa there is an enormous people\u2019s economy, sometimes called the informal economy.\u00a0\u00a0 It is composed of workers who work, but they do not work for employers who make a profit hiring them.\u00a0\u00a0 They do not make a profit themselves either.\u00a0\u00a0 Their main asset is their labour-power, not capital, and their objective is to make a living, not to turn a profit on their investment.\u00a0\u00a0 Most of the time they make less money than they would make if they worked for wages for a prosperous multinational conglomerate or with a good public sector job.\u00a0\u00a0 From the point of view of creating employment we are already in a plural economy, in which capitalism is a sector that provides less than half the jobs. [lxvii]<\/a><\/p>\n

In the light of\u00a0 this definition, I\u00a0 believe I can make more precise two theses I have already been defending, namely first that capitalism is necessary and should be preserved as part of a plural economy, and second that in the absence of a plural economy capitalism drives humanity to social and ecological disaster.\u00a0\u00a0 I have also been saying that a necessary part of the necessary plural economy is the restoration of traditional norms that should have been preserved as the complements of modernity, but instead in many cases have been unwisely swept away in a forward march that is really a backward march toward a so-called development that is really a disaster.<\/p>\n

Think of capitalism as producing commodities for sale, and doing so for profit.\u00a0 Then both its necessity and its unruly tendency to become ungovernable and to spiral out of control can be clearly seen.<\/p>\n

I suggest that capitalism is necessary because it generates continuous increases in productivity that we cannot live without.\u00a0\u00a0 Being a species inclined toward conformity and tradition, we needed something that would cause in Marx\u00b4s famous phrase \u201call that is solid to melt into air\u00a8[lxviii]<\/a>and in capitalism we found it.\u00a0 Let me develop this point citing some thoughts from Peter Drucker.\u00a0 He once said with perhaps pardonable exaggeration that that private business for profit is the only human institution devoted to change.\u00a0\u00a0 All the other institutions, he said, telling a few white lies to make his point, are about preserving what already exists.[lxix]<\/a><\/p>\n

To advance our understanding of why Marx, Drucker, and others attribute to capitalism the remarkable characteristic of leaving nothing stable and constantly tending to change everything, let me repeat my point that competitive pricing leads business to ruin because it drives profit margins to zero.\u00a0\u00a0 Given that tendency, as I already said, normal business strategy consists of seeking a comparative advantage and avoiding competitive pricing. Three of many possible examples are creating barriers to entry so others cannot enter the industry and compete with you; marketing that differentiates your product so nobody else sells exactly what you sell; and selling machinery without a profit and then making a profit by charging high prices for post-sale service and spare parts.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Drucker takes large notice of the fact that one of the main ways to gain a competitive advantage is to innovate.\u00a0 Make something new.\u00a0 Make the same thing a more efficient way.\u00a0 Then at least until others imitate you or at least until your patent protection runs out you are safe from competition and can make a profit.\u00a0\u00a0 Drucker went so far as to say that innovation is the only source of profit.[lxx]<\/a>\u00a0 What he had in mind was not just new technical achievements like the Ipod, but also the enormous increases in productivity due to the art and science of management.\u00a0 He speaks of a managerial revolution starting around 1900, and declares that Frederick Taylor ought to be honoured as a world-historical figure whose deeds made an epoch.[lxxi]<\/a>\u00a0 Not just breakthroughs in technology, and not just sophisticated management, but also the every day activity of the ordinary entrepreneur is sheer creativity.[lxxii]<\/a>\u00a0 The ordinary business person constantly puts together the factors of production in new ways,\u00a0 driven to do so because as soon as the old ways are imitated by competitors they will cease to be profitable.\u00a0 This was true even before knowledge became the leading factor of production, and is today more true than ever.<\/p>\n

One cannot understand anything in Drucker\u2019s writings without considering an older man who was a frequent guest at the Drucker home in Vienna when Peter was a child, the economist Joseph Schumpeter.\u00a0\u00a0 For Schumpeter capitalism is creative destruction.\u00a0\u00a0 Disregarding a large chunk of reality,\u00a0 the chunk where capitalists succeed in escaping the rules of their system by finding ways to insulate their profits from what Fukuyama thinks is the essence of their system (i.e. competitive pricing)\u00a0 capitalists find themselves in a constant struggle to keep their profits from falling to zero and becoming losses.\u00a0\u00a0 Their competitors are seeking to make a better product at a lower price.\u00a0\u00a0 If they do not do the same they are out of the game.\u00a0 Periodically large numbers of entrepreneurs are all driven out of the game at once in crises, recessions, and depressions.\u00a0\u00a0 Schumpeter regarded these destructive troughs in the business cycle as a normal part of capitalism.\u00a0\u00a0 On this point Schumpeter was surely historically right; whatever might be the happy equilibriums of the mathematical models of abstract economic theory.\u00a0 In the process of creative destruction only the most innovative survive because only the innovators can compete.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The result of capitalist creative destruction has been an enormous growth in productivity never seen before in human history.\u00a0\u00a0 Schumpeter estimated it to average about 5% per year for several centuries.<\/p>\n

My opinion is that humanity at this point cannot live without capitalism\u2019s constant innovation and productivity growth.\u00a0 It cannot live, for example, without the constant fall in the price and increase in the quality of solar panels, and similar falling prices and increasing quality of other green technologies.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As advocates of capitalism point out, pre-modern economies were economies for small populations.[lxxiii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The population of the earth could not possibly have grown to seven billion without capitalism.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Population cannot possibly stay at seven billion, nor can it get even larger, while resources like petroleum are running out and new technologies based on other resources must be brought on line, without a dynamic private sector.\u00a0 The private sector is to a great extent driven by the rules of its game to constantly make better products and sell them at lower prices.[lxxiv]<\/a><\/p>\n

Notice that the point that capitalism has resulted in enormous productivity increases is consistent with the definition of it I have chosen:\u00a0\u00a0 Capitalism is investing money to make products in order to sell them for profit.<\/p>\n

I do not want to exaggerate.\u00a0\u00a0 Many of the most important innovations, like the Internet, were incubated for many years in the public sector.\u00a0\u00a0 Strains of wheat needed to keep the world food supply ahead of wheat rust were preserved for centuries in indigenous knowledge systems preserved by peasants in the third world.\u00a0 Penicillin was discovered in a non-profit university.\u00a0\u00a0 Nevertheless, I cannot see a human transition to a socially and ecologically sustainable future without the alignment to the common good of a plurality of institutions with diverse logics that include the logic of a private for-profit sector.<\/p>\n

To explain why capitalism is nevertheless a disaster that will destroy humanity unless humanity learns to govern it better, I will rely on the concept of \u201csystemic imperatives\u201d set forth in her book Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood.[lxxv]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The system in question is capitalism.\u00a0\u00a0 The imperatives are what the system commands.\u00a0 For the individual firm investing money to make products in order to sell them for profit it is imperative, for example, to keep costs down.\u00a0\u00a0 If costs are not under control, there will be no profit.<\/p>\n

Once again my point follows from my definition:\u00a0 capitalism is production for profit; therefore where it is dominant it imposes on the rest of society the systemic imperative to do whatever it takes to create a business climate where investors are confident that if they invest they will make profits.,<\/p>\n

Once capitalism becomes dominant, production only occurs if someone invests expecting a profit.\u00a0\u00a0 It is therefore imperative for society as a whole to maintain conditions under which investors expect profits.\u00a0\u00a0 The Grenoble School calls such a set of conditions a \u201cregime of accumulation.\u201d[lxxvi]<\/a><\/p>\n

We already know from Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter and others that even when capitalism performs at its best, there is chronic unemployment and there are from time to time crises and recessions.\u00a0 But I am not talking about unemployment and recession now; now I am talking about imperatives that command all the time, whether employment is high or low, whether the economy is booming or busting.<\/p>\n

By imperative I mean imperative.\u00a0 The trade unions must obey.\u00a0\u00a0 The government must obey.\u00a0\u00a0 The elected politicians who supposedly have power to govern nations in reality have little power;\u00a0 nor does anyone else have much power,\u00a0 not even the owners of great wealth;\u00a0 whoever you are\u00a0 you must obey the rules that the system imposes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Whatever else happens, there must be conditions that give investors confidence that they will make profits.<\/p>\n

But there are exceptions\u00a0\u00a0 The systemic imperatives command insofar as the economy is capitalist.\u00a0\u00a0 To the extent that the economy is plural,\u00a0 to the extent that people are planting their own gardens and eating the food they grow,\u00a0 to the extent that the hospitals are non-profit charitable foundations,\u00a0 to the extent that houses are built by calling in the cousins and in-laws to spend their Saturdays as volunteer carpenters motivated by family ties, the system is circumvented and its systematic imperatives can be disobeyed with impunity.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go back to ecology now that we understand Ellen Wood\u2019s concept of \u201csystemic imperative.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Na\u00efve ecologists do not understand the problem.\u00a0\u00a0 They say that people need to be educated to realize that the survival of mother earth as a habitable planet is more important than corporate profits.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They say we need to change our values to give saving the biosphere priority over materialism and greed.[lxxvii]<\/a>\u00a0 They miss the point.\u00a0 The point is that whatever else happens investors must make profits.\u00a0\u00a0 Whenever this imperative collides with ecology, as it often does, ecology loses.\u00a0\u00a0 My pessimism is not just gloomy talk.\u00a0\u00a0 It is awareness that the systemic imperatives of the dominant system are incompatible with a sustainable biosphere.[lxxviii]<\/a><\/p>\n

With respect to social issues the problem is not one of finding an electoral majority in favour of a reasonable amount of redistribution of income and wealth from the rich to the poor.\u00a0\u00a0 The problem is that \u201cpopulism\u201d is incompatible with the systemic imperative to create and maintain a regime of accumulation.[lxxix]<\/a><\/p>\n

Back to ecology, most ecologists\u00a0 I know are not so na\u00efve.\u00a0\u00a0 When I talk to ecologists I\u00a0 find that most of them believe that the sheer scale of the changes needed to make the planet sustainable imply that there is no green future without a sea-change at the level of economics.\u00a0\u00a0 I hope I have made it clear too that I consider solving humanity\u2019s ecological problems without solving its social problems to be a flat impossibility.<\/p>\n

What I am telling you is that the sea-change has to go back to 1488.\u00a0\u00a0 If social democracy means a mixed economy with strong labour unions, strong cooperatives, and a strong public sector, then any European can tell you they tried it and it did not work.\u00a0 As my co-author and I show in our book Dilemmas of Social Democracies[lxxx]<\/a> social democracy faces unavoidable dilemmas as long as we remain with the Roman Law paradigm.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Green legislation and pink legislation are feasible only temporarily and only under exceptionally favourable conditions as long as the basic paradigm is Roman.<\/p>\n

A deeper change is needed.\u00a0\u00a0 We need in Hegel\u2019s language an Aufhebung that does not annul capitalism, but rather includes and raises it to a higher level as part of a new synthesis;\u00a0 you can call it democratic socialism standing on the shoulders of capitalism;\u00a0\u00a0 we need a plural economy; we need universities that transform themselves by enlargement,\u00a0 and thus contribute to transforming society by enlargement.\u00a0 We need to infuse our neo-Roman global Gesellschaft[lxxxi]<\/a> with ancient norms typical of the societies Durkheim called segment\u00e9es [lxxxii]<\/a> –an expanded sense of kinship, an embedding of economic relationships in social relationships, norms of reciprocity, norms of redistribution.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps the French Enlightenment had something of the sort in mind when it called for fraternit\u00e9, but as John Rawls has pointed out fraternity has tended to be a word without a program.[lxxxiii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 To make it real, my co-authors and I say, we need not just an inclusive norm (like \u201crights\u201d or \u201centitlement\u201d or \u201ccitizenship\u201d) but a communitarian culture and a plural economy potent enough to cure a society from addiction to the dynamic of capital accumulation.<\/p>\n

Do you get me?\u00a0\u00a0 I am saying that a plural economy repeals the systemic imperatives.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It escapes the necessity to have if not one regime of accumulation then some other regime of\u00a0 accumulation. With a plural economy Society can say to Capital:\u00a0 \u201cListen Capital, this is Society talking.\u00a0\u00a0 We have many fine investment opportunities in South Africa, where you can make good profits and then devote those profits to socially responsible uses, like funding pensions for example.\u00a0\u00a0 We want you to come to South Africa, or stay here if you\u00a0 are already here, and run efficient businesses,\u00a0 innovate, deliver quality goods and services at affordable prices,\u00a0 respect labour unions,\u00a0 pay taxes,\u00a0 collaborate with stakeholders,\u00a0 develop green technologies, contribute\u00a0 to saving the environment,\u00a0 create jobs, and be good citizens of the communities where you operate.\u00a0 That is a plural Society\u2019s offer to Capital.\u00a0\u00a0 Since at this point in history there are oceans of capital sloshing around the globe looking for good investment opportunities,\u00a0 it is quite likely that if some investors do not accept such an offer, others will.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps it should be noted that here I am implicitly taking back my agreement with Wallerstein that the only object of study today is the global economy, not the national economy \u2013but I am not taking it back because Wallerstein\u2019s assertion is an inaccurate description of what is, but rather because the way things are is not the way things have to be.\u00a0\u00a0 An intelligent partial \u201cdecoupling\u201d from global dynamics is possible.<\/p>\n

To those investors who want cheap labour and find South African labour\u00a0 not cheap enough, its taxes not low enough,\u00a0 its environmental laws\u00a0 not lax enough,\u00a0\u00a0 a\u00a0 Society with a plural\u00a0 economy can say\u00a0 forget it, farewell, and good bye.\u00a0 It can say we have the leverage we need to get the best of capitalism, and we have the self-reliance we need to reject the worst of it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We can negotiate with Capital to get what we want because there are other sectors in our economy that can take up the slack when private Capital leaves or chooses not to come.\u00a0\u00a0 Other sectors also create employment; more than one logic organizes the production of goods and services.[lxxxiv]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The inclusion of all is achieved by unbounded organization, by an enlargement of logics, by a sum of diversities.\u00a0\u00a0 The inclusion of all produces a resilient economy that can bounce back and continue to function when global capital chooses to take its money elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Do you understand what I am suggesting for the university?\u00a0\u00a0 I think what I am suggesting is today a feasible proposal for culture change because universities are already interested in jobs for their graduates.\u00a0 Universities already think of themselves as contributing to economic development.\u00a0 There are already dissenters in every faculty who lament the domination of the university by a neoliberal version of what an economy should be, and who are eager to do what they can to breathe some life into the old Platonic and Socratic ideals that call on a university to be a centre of free and independent criticism and inquiry.\u00a0 There are already not just professors but also students who want to keep alive the great conversations about truth and justice and ultimate reality.<\/p>\n

What I am suggesting taps existing reservoirs of discontent, and it interprets existing documents in which universities declare their missions and visions.\u00a0 My co-authors and I propose that the university rethink itself by locating itself in a broader context: by seeing the basic constitutive rules of modernity in a broad perspective, a perspective that includes the whole cultural evolution of humanity in ecological context.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cultural pluralism at an intellectual level paves the way\u00a0 at a practical level for reviving sisterhood and brotherhood, ubuntu,\u00a0\u00a0 as part of a necessary moral and intellectual reform.<\/p>\n

Social democracy will not work \u2013as Europe has shown us\u2014if it is mainly an ultra-modern project of more bureaucracy and less market.\u00a0\u00a0 Capitalism will not become governable until other sectors have grown to be strong enough to provide the employment, the goods, and the services, that capitalism does not supply when it is constrained by standards of social and ecological responsibility.[lxxxv]<\/a><\/p>\n

To survive as a species we need both a culture shift and a power shift.\u00a0 We need a culture shift reviving the ancient ideal that we are all one family living in one home, and that we take care of each other and of our environment.\u00a0\u00a0 We need a power shift changing the rules of the game so that a private business can only stay in business if it is socially and ecologically responsible.\u00a0\u00a0 We need a power shift so that some combination of democracy, rationality, and ethics will have the power to govern capital.<\/p>\n

I am sounding as though I know the answers to the questions I pose, but really I don\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0 I go over my reasoning again and again and I cannot find any mistakes.\u00a0\u00a0 It is clear to me that my ideas are important if true.\u00a0\u00a0 It is clear to me that they are true.\u00a0 But I am haunted by the fear that I have made a mistake somewhere.\u00a0\u00a0 I am haunted by the thought that somewhere in what I am telling you I take some premise to be true that is in fact false.\u00a0 Maybe the ideas I rely on like \u201cconstitutive rules\u201d and \u201cthe logic of capital accumulation\u201d are muddled concepts that only seem clear and important to me because I have not rigorously analyzed them.\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe my pessimism is just a personality trait, not an awareness of reality as it is.[lxxxvi]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe contrary to my pessimism it is perfectly possible to switch to green technologies and save the biosphere simply by learning the physical facts and changing our cultural values. Maybe there is no need to change our economic system.\u00a0 Maybe promoting the spirit of entrepreneurship among the masses will be sufficient to save them from poverty, and maybe teaching ecology to children will be sufficient to save the planet.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it is not just the pessimistic side of my thought that is unrealistic.\u00a0 Maybe my optimism that envisions possible solutions is equally or more unrealistic.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe responsible capitalism in a pluralistic social democracy that revives pre modern ideals of extended family and kinship with nature is impossible.\u00a0 Maybe capitalism must either be accepted or rejected,\u00a0 either allowed to run the world or eliminated root and branch.\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe I am destined to fail because I am proposing new ideas and the human brain is programmed to reject new ideas.[lxxxvii]<\/a>\u00a0 Maybe lack of sufficient imagination to build a sustainable world is a chronic, incurable, and terminal disease; rooted in the very structure of the human brain[lxxxviii]<\/a>.\u00a0 Maybe lack of imagination inevitably will add homo sapiens to the long list of extinct species.\u00a0 Maybe it will add the planet earth to the long list of heavenly bodies spinning in space that have weight and mass but do not have life.<\/p>\n

Obviously we could spend another hour, or day, or week talking about capitalism, but I want to move on now to give an example of a move toward a plural economy that is already happening<\/p>\n

A plural economy that can empower society to form constructive partnerships with private capital negotiating from a position of strength is now being built in South Africa in many ways.\u00a0\u00a0 It is being built wherever the work of the world is getting done without relying on private investors seeking profits putting up the capital necessary to get that work done.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is being built whenever the neighbourhood handyman comes to fix your TV set,\u00a0 or whenever you take clothes to be mended to the neighbourhood seamstress, whenever public money rather than private money funds a long term scheme for hydroelectric power,\u00a0\u00a0 whenever you buy your auto insurance from a mutual insurance cooperative,\u00a0 and whenever you take a\u00a0 ride with a taxi driver who owns his own means of production, namely his taxi.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I will now describe in particular one recent plural economy initiative among thousands, namely the Community Works Programme, CWP.<\/p>\n

My understanding is that Cabinet decided in January of 2009 to bring CWP to one million of the chronically unemployed, and that so far it is reaching about 300,000.\u00a0\u00a0 These numbers in themselves should ring a bell for universities who want their graduates to find employment. There is employment to be found working for programmes like CWP.<\/p>\n

Some of the key ideas behind CWP were articulated by Kate Philip.\u00a0 Kate has served as an adviser to the presidency of South Africa.\u00a0\u00a0 She teaches part of the year at the United Nations ILO in Geneva.\u00a0\u00a0 She recounts that CWP is not the first public programme providing employment for the unemployed.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But it is a programme with a difference.\u00a0 I quote her:\u00a0 \u201cCWP is an area-based programme intended to be ongoing.\u00a0 This allows it to target the poorest areas, areas where market-based jobs are unlikely to come any time soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

The previous programmes were conceived as bridge programmes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They provided temporary jobs designed to be employment experience for people with none.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They were meant to be stepping-stones to employment in the private sector.\u00a0\u00a0 It was assumed that investment would expand and create jobs for everyone, as is normally supposed to happen according to neoliberal orthodoxy.\u00a0 The government thought of itself as providing temporary relief until normality returned.<\/p>\n

Then at some point in the year 2008 the government of South Africa woke up to reality.\u00a0\u00a0 Full employment is not normal.\u00a0\u00a0 In history it has rarely happened and when it has happened it has not lasted long.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The hitch economists are right and the hitchless economists are wrong.\u00a0\u00a0 CWP is designed as a new programme that provides permanent work for two days a week.\u00a0\u00a0 Hopefully the beneficiaries will get more work; hopefully they will get full time work and quit CWP.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But at least they have a floor to stand on, a basic small income.\u00a0 They have a basic opportunity to serve society by doing useful community service.<\/p>\n

CWP understands John Maynard Keynes fundamental point that there is a chronic weakness of effective demand.\u00a0 It understands my and my co-author\u2019s basic point that we have to go back before 1488 and think in terms of reciprocity and redistribution.\u00a0\u00a0 The workers in CWP do not sell anything.\u00a0 They do not work for employers who sell products they make.<\/p>\n

They do work.\u00a0\u00a0 They build fences to protect food crops from grazing animals.\u00a0\u00a0 They care for orphans and vulnerable children.\u00a0\u00a0 They build sporting facilities for youth.\u00a0\u00a0 They maintain roads.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They plant community gardens and shade trees.\u00a0\u00a0 They work as their ancestors worked providing useful services for their sisters and brothers.\u00a0\u00a0 Local ward committees and local development for set priorities deciding what tasks most need to be performed when CWP labour-power is made available to the local community.<\/p>\n

Where does the money come to pay them for working?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It comes from the government of South Africa.\u00a0\u00a0 For some related programmes, such as the Organization Workshops that here in South Africa are teaching organizing skills to the unemployed,\u00a0 and such as Soul City social television that promotes local community self-reliance,\u00a0 there is also funding from British Petroleum and other corporate social responsibility donors and from international development assistance.<\/p>\n

I have not really answered the question where the money for CWP comes from.\u00a0\u00a0 Given that it comes from the government, where does the government get the money?<\/p>\n

I do not know where the South African government gets its money.\u00a0\u00a0 I intend to look into the matter and find out.\u00a0 Since I do not yet know the facts, I will give you a theoretical answer.\u00a0\u00a0 I will give you not a complete theory of taxation, but a partial theory advocating the taxing of dysfunctional profit and economic rent.<\/p>\n

One of the causes of the downfall of social democracy in Europe was that high taxes drove business away.\u00a0 Current neoliberal orthodoxy solves this problem with the Value Added Tax falling on consumers.\u00a0 Since it is a tax on consumption it is supposed to be investment-neutral.\u00a0\u00a0 My co-authors and I favour a different solution.\u00a0 Fund community service in a plural economy with taxes on dysfunctional profits and economic rents.<\/p>\n

A dysfunctional profit is one that is not needed for motivation.\u00a0\u00a0 A social function of profit is to reward investment and entrepreneurship by providing incentives.\u00a0\u00a0 But sometimes the incentive is redundant.\u00a0\u00a0 For example, if the working capital needed to run a platinum mine can be raised at 12%, if the investors are raking in profits of 37%, then 25% is dysfunctional profit.<\/p>\n

The concept of economic rent is similar.\u00a0\u00a0 It is defined as income that does not change behaviour.\u00a0\u00a0 If a professional rugby player would play just as well for a million rand, but due to the sale of television rights to sporting events he gets two million rand, then one million is economic rent.<\/p>\n

The idea of economic rent goes back to David Ricardo in 1817.\u00a0\u00a0 He claimed that the landlords who own the best land collect rent without doing any work, simply because they are owners.\u00a0 The amount of rent is determined by the difference between what their land produces and what the worst land being cultivated produces.\u00a0\u00a0 If higher demand for food causes the cultivation marginal land that then yields a thousand pounds of revenue a year, which is just enough to pay the farmer and his workers for their toil and no more, then that marginal land yields no rent.\u00a0 Meanwhile, excellent land that yields revenue of three thousand a year with the same toil and trouble by the farmer and his workers will pay the landlord two thousand a year.\u00a0\u00a0 The happy landlord does nothing and pockets the extra money, while the farmer and the workers make the same thousand pounds they would make on the worst land.<\/p>\n

The basic idea really goes back to Adam Smith in 1776.\u00a0\u00a0 Smith asked the question how much rent landlords will collect on their land.\u00a0\u00a0 His answer was that they will collect as much as they can.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They will leave the farmer just as much as is necessary to keep the farmer from quitting.\u00a0\u00a0 The rest goes to the owner. \u00a0\u00a0If the owner is the nation, it would follow that the rest goes to the nation.\u00a0\u00a0 We can hope that a 21st century nation playing the role of landlord would be more generous to farmers and workers than Smith\u2019s\u00a0 18th century landlords were,\u00a0 but would still raise substantial sums for the public purse.<\/p>\n

Now if we go back before 1488 and make it a principle that whoever may now hold legal title to land or to any other asset,\u00a0 in principle and in the last analysis what we now call dysfunctional\u00a0 profits and economic rents belong to the tribe,\u00a0 we have the answer how to pay for the Community Works Programme.\u00a0\u00a0 The ultimate owner, Society, siphons off income that is redundant as an incentive to produce socially useful production.\u00a0 The siphoning is not necessarily done by taxation;\u00a0 it can also be done, for example, by direct public ownership of natural resources, or, for another example, by the endowment of charitable, cultural, and educational foundations so that charity, art, and education get the dysfunctional profits and the economic rents.<\/p>\n

In a plural economy employment does not require paying customers; it does not require enough effective demand to sell all the products that would be made by full employment.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Since John Maynard Keynes told us that a chronic weakness of effective demand is a chronic drag on employment, and since the evidence has proved Keynes right, we breathe a sigh of relief.<\/p>\n

In principle we now know how to fund any programme that builds full employment by organizing community service.\u00a0\u00a0 We know how to repeal systemic imperatives and therefore we know how to make the preservation of the biosphere possible.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0\u00a0 will close by referring to the book The Idea of a University by John Henry Cardinal Newman.\u00a0 The book is a series of lectures given on the occasion of the founding of the University of Dublin.\u00a0 Newman\u2019s main point is that a university is a place where scholars from different specialties enjoy institutional support for coming together to discuss important ideas.\u00a0 It is a point which speaks to my condition.\u00a0\u00a0 It is perfectly clear to me that humanity is on a collision course with ecological and social reality.\u00a0\u00a0 It is perfectly clear to me that the mainspring that drives human action at this point in history is investment for profit.\u00a0 I wish it were not true, but I believe it is true, that the mainspring of the global economy is incompatible with species and biosphere survival.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is perfectly clear to me that the solution to this problem is a plural economy which preserves the productivity gains and innovative magic of capitalism as part of a plurality of logics which add up to dignity and livelihood for all.\u00a0 It is clear to me that whether humanity can become a sustainable species depends on harnessing capitalism to the common good and making it governable.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We need a socio-economic system that rationality and ethics can govern.\u00a0 It is perfectly clear to me that we can only get such a system if we are willing to reconsider modernity and learn from ancient wisdom.<\/p>\n

\u00a0All of this is perfectly clear to me, but I am just one person.\u00a0 I am just one voice.\u00a0 It is quite likely that some of the ideas that for me are almost self-evidently true are in fact not true.\u00a0\u00a0 I need a university, or ideally more than one university, in Cardinal Newman\u2019s sense of the idea of a university.\u00a0\u00a0 That is my plea.\u00a0 Once again, I appreciate the opportunity to share ideas with you.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It has been a pleasure to talk to you, it will be a pleasure to hear your responses, and if you invite me back it will be pleasure to come back again.<\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

[i]<\/a>\u00a0 I am a pessimist because I believe with Novek and Kampen that \u201c…the relationship between economic expansion and environmental protection remains fundamentally contradictory.\u201d\u00a0 Joel Novek and Karen Kampen. \u201cSustainable or Unsustainable Development: an Analysis of an Environmental Controversy.\u201d Canadian Journal of Sociology.<\/span>\u00a0 Vol. 17 (1992).\u00a0 Pp. 249-273. p. 250.\u00a0\u00a0 This argument is further elaborated by many authors including Michael Redclift, Sustainabe Development: Exploring the Contradictions.\u00a0 <\/span>London:\u00a0 Methuen, 1987.\u00a0 Further I believe, as I will discuss below, that economic expansion is an imperative of the dominant capitalist system, and that consequently until that system is radically reformed economic expansion will often trump environmental protection.\u00a0 See Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Should Know about Capitalism.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Monthly Review Press, 2011.<\/p>\n

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[ii]<\/a> See for example the works of Norbert Elias.\u00a0\u00a0 Among others,\u00a0 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process; The History of Manners.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Urizen Books, 1978.\u00a0\u00a0 (original German edition 1936); The Civilizing Process, Volume 2<\/span>.\u00a0 Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[iii]<\/a> The concept of \u201csystemic imperative\u201d is developed by Ellen Meiksins Wood in Empire of Capital.<\/span>\u00a0 London: Verso.\u00a0 2d. Ed. 2005.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[iv]<\/a> See for example Karl Polanyi et al Trade and Market in the Early Empires.<\/span>\u00a0 Glencoe: Free Press, 1957;\u00a0 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics.\u00a0 <\/span>New York: Aldyne de Gruter, 1974.\u00a0 Marcel Mauss, The Gift.\u00a0 <\/span>New York: Norton, 1990.\u00a0 (French original 1924).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[v]<\/a>\u00a0 The failure of the Swedish Model and other attempts to build social democracy without changing the basic cultural structure of modernity is analyzed in Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, The Dilemmas of Social Democracies.<\/span>\u00a0 Lanham:\u00a0 Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The concept of \u201cregime of accumulation\u201d has been developed by the Grenoble School in France and is discussed by David Harvey in his The Condition of Postmodernity.. <\/span>Oxford:\u00a0 Blackwell, 1989.\u00a0 Cf. footnote 72 below.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[vi]<\/a> Catherine Hoppers and Howard Richards, Rethinking Thinking: Modernity\u2019s Other and the Transformation of the University.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 Pretoria:\u00a0 University of South Africa, 2011.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[vii]<\/a> Max Weber makes much of the fact that while the passion for systematizing law came from Rome, much of the detail of modern commercial law was invented in the European middle ages.\u00a0 Others make a great point (too great a point in my opinion) of the distinctiveness of Anglo-American common law.\u00a0 For the sake of brevity I refer to \u201cRoman Law\u201d as the largest single source of the legal framework of global capitalism without denying\u00a0 the importance of non-Roman sources,.\u00a0\u00a0 I stress the market-constituting principles of property, free juridical subject, and contract, this latter not assuming its modern form in the Roman tradition until the 17th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[viii]<\/a> These synthetic assertions about\u00a0 private law and its Roman roots (and similar roots in the related common law tradition) are documented in chapters four and five of our book, and also in the works of other authors including\u00a0 Karl Renner, The Institutions of Private Law and their Social Functions<\/span>.\u00a0 London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,\u00a0 1976 (first German edition 1904);\u00a0 John R. Commons, The Legal Foundations of Capitalism.<\/span>\u00a0 New York: Macmillan, 1924.\u00a0 Commons does not talk about Roman law as such but about the general legal conditions that make capitalism possible, which turn out to be the same as the main principles of European commercial law derived mainly from Roman sources.\u00a0\u00a0 Max Weber devoted his doctoral dissertation to showing that the influence of Roman Law o n modern institutions has been generally exaggerated, and that actually the legal framework of modern commerce came largely from non-Roman Italian and late medieval sources,\u00a0 but even he acknowledged that the Roman passion for system in law was\u00a0\u00a0 constitutive of modernity.\u00a0 (See the parts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft <\/span>that treat of Die Wirtschaft und die Ordnungen.)\u00a0 Nothing essential to my argument depends on how much the basic cultural structure property-contract-juridical subject literally derives historically from Rome, and how much I am just using \u201cRoman Law\u201das a convenient label for it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[ix]<\/a> See Ralf Michaels and Nils Jansen, \u201cPrivate Law Beyond the State? Europeanization, Globalization, Privatization,\u00a8 The American Journal of Comparative Law<\/span>\u00a0 Vol. 54 (2006) pp. 843-890, and by my some time co-author Joanna Swanger,\u00a0 \u201cFeminist Community Building in Ciudad Juarez: A Local Cultural Alternative to the Structural Violence of Globalization,\u201d Latin American Perspectives<\/span> Vol 34 (2007) pp. 843-890.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[x]<\/a> \u201cToday there is only one social system, and therefore only one mode of production extant, the capitalist world-economy.\u201d\u00a0 Immanuel Wallerstein, \u201cCivilizations and Modes of Production: Conflicts and Convergences.\u201d\u00a0 Theory and Society.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 Vol. 5 (1978) pp. 1-10. p. 7.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xi]<\/a> The argument that those rules make that dynamic possible and inevitable is made in Hoppers and Richards op. cit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[xii]<\/a> Edgar Morin, Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future.<\/span>\u00a0 Paris: UNESCO, 2001.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[xiii]<\/a> The idea of constitutive rules and the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules can be traced back to Kant.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A recent seminal text is John Searle, Speech Acts.\u00a0 <\/span>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.\u00a0 A contribution of our Rethinking Thinking<\/span> is to specify what the constitutive rules of the modern world-system are, namely the main principles of Roman Law.\u00a0\u00a0 In my book Understanding the Global Economy.<\/span>\u00a0 Santa Barbara: Peace Education Books, 2005, I show that those rules are essential to explanations in economics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xiv]<\/a> That rules are causes is argued systematically by Rom Harre in several works including Rom Harre and Paul Secord, The Explanation of Social Behaviour<\/span>.\u00a0 Totowa NJ:\u00a0 Rowman and Littlefield, 1973.\u00a0 That\u00a0 interpretation referring to constitutive rules is essential for causal explanation in the human sciences is argued by Charles Taylor in his seminal article, \u201cInterpretation and the Sciences of Man,\u201d Review of Metaphysics<\/span>.\u00a0 Vol. 25 (1973) pp. 3-51 and often reprinted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[xv]<\/a> In today\u2019s neoliberal intellectual climate we are already challenging the establishment simply by assuming that modernity and its characteristic economic logic have\u00a0 historical origins, and do not simply reflect the formal character of reason everywhere and everywhen.\u00a0\u00a0 Although Weber did not join Gustav Schmoller in a general rejection of theoretical deductive models,\u00a0 he was similarly concerned to defend an alternative to the pure economics of Carl Menger and others that purported (with important qualifications) to be valid everywhere and everywhen.\u00a0 See Peter Breiner, \u201cThe Political Logic of Economics and the Economic Logic of Modernity in Max Weber,\u201d Political Theory.<\/span>\u00a0 Vol. 23 (1995). \u00a0Pp. 25-47.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[xvi]<\/a> \u201cThe new structures of society were marked by the differentiation of the two functionally intermeshing systems that had taken shape around the organizational cores of the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic state apparatus.\u00a0 Weber understood this process as the institutionalization of purposive-rational economic and administrative action.\u201d\u00a0 J\u00fcrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity<\/span>.\u00a0 Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 1985. p. 2.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xvii]<\/a> \u201cDie heutige Wirtschaft beruht auf durch Kontrake erworbenen Chancen.\u201d Today\u2019s economy rests on calculations made possible by contracts.\u00a0 \u201cDie universelle Herrschaft der Marktvergessellschaftung verlangt \u2026 ein nach rationalen Regeln kalkulierbares Funktionieren des Rechts.\u201d\u00a0 The universal authority of market institutions demands legal rules that make [the consequences of actions] calculable.\u201d Max\u00a0 Weber,\u00a0 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft<\/span> (Economy and Society<\/span>)\u00a0 (various editions) in the section on the meaning of legal enforceability for the economy, which is in part two, section six, chapter three at the very end. (my translations)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[xviii]<\/a>\u00a0 What are claimed to be natural quasi-physical psychic laws (like Fechner\u2019s law of response to stimulus)\u00a0 in marginal utility theory are in fact generalizations about social behaviour.\u00a0 Max Weber, \u201cDie Grenznutzlehre und das \u2018psychophysische\u2019 Grundgesetz.\u201d in his Gessamelte Aufs\u00e4tze zur Wissenschafslehre.<\/span>\u00a0 Tubingen: Mohr, 1982.\u00a0 e.g. p. 393.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[xix]<\/a> Rosa Luxembourg, The Accumulation of Capital.<\/span>\u00a0 London: Routledge, 1951.\u00a0 (First German Edition 1913)\u00a0 Wallerstein , Amin, and other authors give accounts of just what dynamics led to the European global expansion not identical to Luxembourg\u2019s, but I would claim there is wide agreement among scholars that there was something inherent in capitalism\u2019s driving forces that moved Europe to expand its system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xx]<\/a>\u00a0 I find support for this suggestion in Adam Smith, who uses the term \u201ccivilization\u201d or \u201ccivilize\u201d to refer to establishing the legal basis of a market economy.\u00a0 The first three chapters of The Wealth of Nations<\/span> contrast the poverty of the savages with the civilized,\u00a0 attributing\u00a0 the prosperity of the latter mainly to the division of labor and the accumulation of capital,\u00a0 both of which are made possible by civilization regarded as the establishment of justice.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He writes that the three classes of those who live by rent, those who live by profit, and those who live by wages are the \u201c\u2026constituent orders of every civilized society,\u201d in the Conclusion of Book I, Chapter 11 \u201cOf the Rent of Land\u201d (various editions, first published 1776).\u00a0 David Ricardo similarly explains the poverty of the savages by the\u00a0 lack of justice among them.\u00a0\u00a0 It is more common, however, to regard the establishment of European-style justice as just one aspect no more centralthan others others in\u00a0 what was called Europe\u2019s civilizing mission.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[xxi]<\/a> Richard B. Lee, Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers. <\/span>Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxii]<\/a> The word \u201cBantu\u201d was coined by the German Wilhelm Bleek to name the languages of southern Africa that were not Khoisan (not Bushman or Hottentot).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[xxiii]<\/a>\u00a0 These dates refer to a \u201csecond Bantu expansion\u201d (the first starting from an area in what is now the Nigerian plateau and not getting as far as most of what is now South Africa) at a time when the Bantu peoples were already iron-using agriculturalists.\u00a0 M.A. Bakel, \u201cThe \u2018Bantu\u2019 Expansion: Demographic Models,\u201d Current Anthropology<\/span>.\u00a0 Vol 22 (1981) pp. 688-691.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxiv]<\/a>\u00a0 See e.g. Makale op cit. p. 689.\u00a0 \u201c\u2026oral traditions recall wars between \u2018pygmy\u2019 hunters and farmers, and a glance at the distribution of the pygmies shows they were driven out of large areas.\u00a0 \u2026The hunters either had to leave in search of ever fewer empty lands, or they had to \u2026accept dependency\u2026\u00a0 San hunters, hemmed in by cereal growers, moved away, sometimes fought them, often intermarried\u2026.\u201d\u00a0 Jan Vansina, \u201cWestern Bantu Expansion,\u201d The Journal of African History.<\/span>\u00a0 Vol 25 (1984).\u00a0 Pp. 129-145. p. 144.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxv]<\/a>\u00a0 In Freedom Park Museum in Pretoria there are exhibits detailing early massacres of blacks by whites.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxvi]<\/a> See Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.<\/span>London: Bougle-L\u2019Ouverture, 1972; Maria Mies in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale<\/span> extends the argument about the violent implantation of European institutions to all continents.\u00a0 London: Zed Books, 1986.\u00a0 For a more detailed review of anthropological and historical studies of African economic institutions prior to European contact see George Dalton, review of An Economic History of West Africa<\/span> by A.G. Hopkins in African Economic History<\/span> Vol. 1 (1976) pp. 51-101 and by the same author\u00a0 \u201cTraditional Production in Primitive African Economies,\u201d The Quarterly Journal of Economics.<\/span>\u00a0 Vol 76 (1962)\u00a0 pp. 360-378.\u00a0 I am siding with Polanyi and the \u201csubstantivists\u201d in the \u201csubstantivist\/formalist\u201d controversies.\u00a0 As Peter Breiner op. cit. p. 31 remarks, \u201c\u2026capitalist culture selects out and cultivates the very behaviour that marginal utility [i.e. capitalist economic theory] postulates as universal.\u201d\u00a0 [words in brackets added]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxvii]<\/a> These brief remarks on the history of Roman Law summarize Chapter Four of our Rethinking Thinking<\/span> op. cit. which in turn relies on Ferdinand Tonnies Community and Society<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957 (first published as Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft<\/span> in 1887), and on Juan Iglesias, Derecho Romano. <\/span>Barcelona: Ariel, 1976.\u00a0 The latter is a standard text book on Roman Law used in the law schools of the Spanish-speaking world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxviii]<\/a> The story of their implantation everywhere is told by Immanuel Wallerstein in numerous works, by Samir Amin in his Accumulation on a World Scale<\/span>\u00a0 (two volumes).\u00a0 New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, and by Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale.\u00a0 <\/span>London: Zed, 1987.\u00a0 A major step in their implantation in Europe itself, the conversion of common lands to private land exploited to produce wool for export, is famously recounted by Karl Marx in Chapter 32 of the first volume of Capital<\/span> (various editions).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxix]<\/a> See for examples\u00a0 of the vast literature touching on the interaction between modern institutions and academic subjects\u00a0 Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science<\/span>.\u00a0 Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995;\u00a0 Gideon Freudenthal, Atom und Individuum in Zeitalters Newton: zur Genese der Mechanistischen Natur und Sozial philosophie <\/span>.\u00a0 Frankfurt; Suhrkamp, 2010.,\u00a0 Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses<\/span>.\u00a0 Paris: Gallimard, 1966;\u00a0 Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology<\/span>.\u00a0 London: Heinemann, 1971;\u00a0 Gunnar Myrdahl, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory<\/span>\u00a0 London: International Library of Sociology, 1953;\u00a0 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of\u00a0 European Sciences<\/span>.\u00a0 Evanston: Northwestern University, 1953 (unfinished German original composed 1934-37); and of course our own book Catherine Hoppers and Howard Richards, Rethinking Thinking<\/span>.\u00a0 Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2011.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxx]<\/a> Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man.<\/span>\u00a0 New York: Free Press, 1992. p. 61.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxxi]<\/a>\u00a0 There is a vast literature criticizing the Bologna process and the worldwide subordination of higher education to economics.\u00a0\u00a0 See for example Gerard Delanty, \u201cIdeologies of Knowledge Society and the Contradictions of Higher Education,\u201d Policy Futures in Education<\/span> Vol. 1 (2003) pp. 71-82; Henry Etzkovitz, \u201cThe Evolution of the Entrepreneurial University,\u201d International Journal of Technology and Globalisation<\/span>.\u00a0 Vol. 1 (2004) pp. 64-77.\u00a0\u00a0 For an analysis of the text of the Bologna declaration see Chris Lorenz cited below.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxxii]<\/a> Lee Harvey, \u201cNew Realities: The relationship between higher education and employment.\u201d Tertiary Education and Management.<\/span>\u00a0 Vol. 6 (2000)\u00a0 pp. 3-17.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxxiii]<\/a> Lorenz refers to J\u00fcrgen Habermas,\u201d Technology and Science as \u2018Ideology\u2019\u201d in J\u00fcrgen Habermas on Politics and Society: a Reader<\/span>.\u00a0 Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. pp. 237-265.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxxiv]<\/a>\u00a0 Chris Lorenz, \u201cWill the Universities Survive the European Integration?,\u201d Sociologia Internationalis<\/span>\u00a0 Vol. 44 (2006) pp. 123-151.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxxv]<\/a>\u00a0 C. Lopera, \u201cAntinomias, dilemas, y falsas premises que condicionan la gestion universitaria.\u201d Revista Mexicana de Investigacion Educativa.<\/span>\u00a0 Vol. 9 (2004) pp. 617-635.\u00a0\u00a0 There is a literature about \u201cfalse premises\u201d in the criteria used for measuring the performance of universities, but Lopera and I have in mind a deeper set of false premises regarding the economic (and ultimately cultural and ecological) premises of higher education.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxxvi]<\/a> That there is no community without a community story and that ecology can provide a story for today\u2019s humanity is a concept developed by Thomas Berry (1914 -2009).\u00a0\u00a0 See Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme,\u00a0 The Universe Story.\u00a0 <\/span>San Francisco: Harper, 1992;\u00a0 Anne Lonergan and Caroline Richards (eds.)\u00a0 Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology\u00a0 <\/span>New London: 23d Books, 1995.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxxvii]<\/a> The term \u201cecology\u201d was coined by Ernst Haeckel\u00a0 (1834-1919) who defined it as the study of the relationships of organisms to their environments, which I take necessarily to mean synthesizing the natural sciences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxxviii]<\/a> \u201cThe university, so long as it has no theological school, cannot be a real university. \u2026because it does not recognize that department of learning which is the highest, the deepest, the most comprehensive, and the most far-reaching of all.\u00a0\u00a0 Theology is and must always be the mother and queen of the sciences.\u00a0 All the sciences spring from theology as their common mother \u2013 they tend to theology as their common goal.\u201d\u00a0 Charles A. Briggs, \u201cThe Scope of Theology,\u201d\u00a0 The American Journal of Theology<\/span>.\u00a0 Vol. 1 (1897). Pp. 38-70.\u00a0 p. 39.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xxxix]<\/a> See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties<\/span>.\u00a0 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (original German edition 1798);\u00a0 Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Standpoint.<\/span> Indianapolis:\u00a0 Bobbs-Merrill, 1963 (original German edition 1784);\u00a0 Timothy Rahti, Histories of the University: Kant and Humboldt.<\/span>\u00a0 MLN\u00a0 Vol. 102 (1987) pp. 437-460.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xl]<\/a> See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge,<\/span>\u00a0 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.\u00a0 (original French edition 1879).\u00a0\u00a0 Lyotard argues that all the metanarratives, including the Kantian, have become indefensible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xli]<\/a> Burton Clark, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways to Transformation.<\/span> Oxford: International Association of Universities, 1998;\u00a0 Peter John Williams, \u201cValid Knowledge: The Economy and the Academy,\u201d Higher Education<\/span> Vol. 54 (2007) pp. 511-523.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xlii]<\/a> The leading author of the contemporary critical realist school is no doubt Roy Bhaskar.\u00a0 See for example his The Possibility of Naturalism.\u00a0 <\/span>Brighton, Sussex:\u00a0 Harvester Press, 1979.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xliii]<\/a> This point is made in Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, \u201cCulture Change,\u201d a chapter in the book Joe de Rivera (ed.) Handbook on Building Cultures of Peace.<\/span>\u00a0 New York: Springer, 2008.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xliv]<\/a> Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis.\u00a0 <\/span>New York: Oxford, 1954.\u00a0 p. 640. p. 1026.\u00a0 For a hitchless economist like Adam Smith industry and employment are limited by the availability of capital.\u00a0 For a hitch economist like John Maynard Keynes there is a chronic weakness of effective demand that limits employment and\u00a0 production (or manifests itself as overproduction)..\u00a0 My co-authors and I hold that this level of analysis is superficial, and that the problems it raises can only be solved by deep culture change reviving pre-modern form of social relationships such as those known in Africa as ubuntu. Desmond Tutu associates ubuntu with the core message of Christianity and other major religions.\u00a0 Michael Jesse Battle, The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu.<\/span>\u00a0 Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1997.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xlv]<\/a>\u00a0 Schumpeter op. cit. p. 482.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xlvi]<\/a> Put the other way around, Keynes defines numerically a propensity to consume that measures how much of their income consumers (or other economic entities) spend.\u00a0\u00a0 The propensity to consume (the ratio between money out and money in) would be unity, i.e. one, if consumers spent all their money.\u00a0 In practice it is usually less than one because there is a liquidity preference, a preference for one reason or another to hold cash instead of goods.\u00a0 John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.<\/span>\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Harcourt Brace, 1936.\u00a0 Book III (pp. 89-134)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xlvii]<\/a> \u201cMoreover, the evidence indicates that full, or even approximately full, employment is of rare and short-lived occurrence.\u201d\u00a0 Keynes op. cit. pp. 249-50.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xlviii]<\/a>\u00a0 Nicholas Kaldor analyzes the decline of the influence of Keynes in his \u201cKeynesian Economics after Fifty Years,\u201d in D Worswick and J. Trevithick (eds.) Keynes and the Modern World<\/span>.\u00a0 Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[xlix]<\/a>\u00a0 See Ulrich Teichler, \u201cResearch on the Relationships between Higher Education and the World of Work:Past Achievements, Problems and New Challenges,\u201d Higher Education.<\/span> Vol. 38 (1999)\u00a0 pp. 169-90; Peter Jarvis, \u201cGlobal Trends in Lifelong Learning and the Response of the Universities,\u201d Comparative Education.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 Vol. 35 (1999) pp. 249-257;\u00a0 Ivar Bleiklie, \u201cOrganizing Higher Education in a Knowledge Society,\u201d Higher Education.<\/span>\u00a0 Vol. 49 (2005)\u00a0 pp. 31-59.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[l]<\/a> Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics.<\/span>\u00a0 New York: Norton, 2009.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[li]<\/a> John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis.<\/span>\u00a0 New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lii]<\/a>\u00a0 I refer mainly to Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, The Dilemmas of Social Democracies.<\/span>\u00a0 Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006;\u00a0\u00a0 Catherine Hoppers and\u00a0 Howard Richards, Rethinking Thinking.<\/span>\u00a0 Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2011.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[liii]<\/a> Keynes General Theory<\/span> op. cit. p. 254.\u00a0 See also Keynes\u2019 proposals for a different institutional framework at pages 372-384.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[liv]<\/a>\u00a0 See the works of George Dalton, Marshall Sahlins, and Karl Polanyi et al previously cited and the sources to which they refer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lv]<\/a>\u00a0 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific<\/span>.\u00a0 New York: E.P. Dutton, 1961. (1922)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lvi]<\/a>\u00a0 Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism<\/span>. \u00a0<\/span>New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lvii]<\/a>\u00a0 See Gerald Cohen, Karl Marx\u2019s Theory of History:\u00a0 a Defense<\/span>.\u00a0 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.\u00a0 pp. 64-69, 80-83.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lviii]<\/a>\u00a0 Francis Fukuyama,\u00a0 The End of History and the Last Man.<\/span>\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Free Press, 1992,\u00a0 Fukuyama identifies capitalism with allocation of resources by competitive pricing at op cit.\u00a0 pages 40, 90, and 94.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lix]<\/a>\u00a0 Michael\u00a0 Porter\u2019s book on business strategy, a standard text in schools of management, openly acknowledges that the whole point is to find a privileged market niche where competitive pricing is avoided by\u00a0 means like those I mention above.\u00a0 Michael Porter, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance<\/span>.\u00a0 New York: Free Press, 2002.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lx]<\/a> This point is implicit or explicit in all of Amartya Sen\u2019s works.\u00a0\u00a0 For example, Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, India<\/span>, Economic Development and Social Opportunity.<\/span>\u00a0 Delhi: Oxford, 1995.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxi]<\/a> \u201cThe profitability of [businesses] depends to an important degree on their relative monopolization.\u00a0 That is to say, if a box contains the conditions of perfect competition \u2013multiple small sellers and multiple small buyers, with perfect information\u2014then the rate of profit must inevitably be minimal\u2026,\u201d\u00a0 Immanuel Wallerstein, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d\u00a0 Review (Fernand Braudel Center)<\/span>\u00a0 Vol\u00a0 23 (2000) p. 8.\u00a0 The irony that according to the standard economics that serves as an ideology for capitalism in the long run there can be no profits is emphasized in Joseph Schumpeter, Theory of Economic Development<\/span>.\u00a0 Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.\u00a0 pp. 29-31, 45-46.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxii]<\/a> Perhaps the most exhaustive attempt to\u00a0 sort the wheat from the chaff in Marx\u2019s theory of history is Anthony Giddens multi-volume A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism<\/span>.\u00a0 A plausible defense of\u00a0 the theory is Gerald Cohen\u2019s cited above.\u00a0\u00a0 The defense depends on identifying the theory with Marx\u2019s general approach, and not with his specific predictions, many of which have turned out to be mistaken.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxiii]<\/a> In particular the patterns in history observed by Marx can be understood as consequences of the basic cultural structures of western modernity, as I have argued explicitly in an unpublished paper, \u201cWhat Does it Mean to be a Left Wing Economist Today?\u201d and implicitly in my Understanding the Global Economy<\/span>.\u00a0 Delhi: Maadhyam Books, 2000.\u00a0 (That the cultural structures explain economic phenomena is there explicit; that they explain what Marx tried to explain is implicit.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxiv]<\/a>\u00a0 See Cohen op. cit. on this point.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxv]<\/a>\u00a0 My definition is not quite the same as Marx\u2019s, since for Marx the very idea of \u201ccommodity\u201d includes the exploitation of labour to produce the commodity.\u00a0\u00a0 The \u201ccommodity fetish\u201d is\u00a0 a display of power over labour.\u00a0 Marx argues that the secret of profit-making is to extract surplus-value from labour.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxvi]<\/a> Peter Drucker, \u201cBusiness Objectives and Survival Needs: Notes on a Discipline of Business Enterprise,\u201dThe Journal of Business\u00a0 <\/span>Vol. 31 (1958) pp. 81-90.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lxvii]<\/a>\u00a0 According to Chapter Three of Global Employment Trends 2012<\/span>.\u00a0 Geneva: ILO, 2012.\u00a0 <\/span>authored by the staff of the Employment Trends Unit of the ILO, in North Africa 4 out of 10 of those employed either work on their own account or are in unpaid family employment.\u00a0\u00a0 Adding to this figure those employed in the public, non-profit, traditional tribal, and cooperative sectors should bring it over 50%.\u00a0\u00a0 In Sub Saharan Africa more than 76% of employees are said to be \u201cvulnerable,\u201d which in ILO terminology means they do not have jobs in the modern private or public sector.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxviii]<\/a> I have slightly modified this famous phrase from Marx and Engel\u00b4s Communist Manifesto.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxix]<\/a> \u201c\u2026in the business enterprise we have the first institution which is designed to produce change.\u00a0 All human institutions since the dawn of prehistory or earlier had always been designed to prevent change\u2014all of\u00a0 them: family government, church, army.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Drucker, Id. p. 86.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxx]<\/a> \u201cIndeed the central entrepreneurial contribution, and the one which alone is rewarded with a profit, is to bring about the unique event, the innovation that changes the probabilities.\u201d Peter Drucker, \u201cLong-range Planning: Challenge to Management Science,\u00a8\u201d Management Science<\/span> Vol. 5 (1959) pp. 238-249. P. 239.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxi]<\/a>\u00a0 For Drucker on Taylor see Peter Drucker, \u201cThe Rise of the Knowledge Society,\u201d The Wilson Quarterly. <\/span>Vol. 17 (1993) pp. 52-71, pp. 61-63.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxii]<\/a> Friedrich von Hayek emphasized that the knowledge that mainly gets the work of the world done is the detailed knowledge of particular situations known only to local actors and in principle not knowable by a central directing authority.\u00a0 F.A. Hayek, \u00a8The Use of Knowledge in Society,\u00a8American Economic Review.<\/span>Vol. 45 (1945) pp. 419-30.\u00a0 \u00a0Some universities have followed out this line of\u00a0 thought to conclude that they should be teaching skills closer to those actually used in the world of work.\u00a0 See M. Gibbons et al, The New Production of Knowledge.<\/span>\u00a0 London: Sage, 1994;\u00a0 Jonathan D. Jansen, \u201cMode\u00a0 2 Knowledge and Institutional Life: taking Gibbons on a walk through a South African university,\u00a8Higher Education.<\/span>.\u00a0 <\/span>Vol. 43 (2002) pp. 507-521.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxiii]<\/a>\u00a0 Adam Smith begins The Wealth of Nations<\/span> comparing the misery of the savage with the prosperity of civilization, attributing the latter to the division of labour and the accumulation of capital.<\/p>\n

Eugen Bohm-Bawerk coined the idea, later taken up by von Mises,\u00a0 that the roundaboutness (greater investment and longer waiting times to develop the product) of capitalism makes it much more productive than earlier modes of production.\u00a0\u00a0 Marxists speak similarly of a changing composition of capital (more fixed capital, less variable capital, i.e. less labour) .\u00a0 Empirical studies show that these general claims that capitalism increases productivity which increases population need to be qualified by considering the devastating effects of oppressive exploitation.\u00a0\u00a0 See Dennis Cordell and Joel Gregory (eds), African Population and Capitalism.\u00a0 <\/span>Boulder: Westview, 1988.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxiv]<\/a> Of course there are major exceptions to the principle that capitalism is innovative and increases productivity, \u00a0and that is a reason why it is necessary to make capitalism governable. \u00a0Public authority needs to step in for example when firms buy up patents to keep others from using them, for the purpose of raising prices and profits by preventing productivity from increasing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxv]<\/a> Ellen Meiksins Wood,\u00a0 Empire of Capital.<\/span>\u00a0 London: Verso, 2005.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxvi]<\/a> Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation<\/span>. London:\u00a0 Verso, 1979; Robert Boyer, La theorie de la r\u00e9gulation\u00a0: une analyse critique.<\/span>\u00a0 Paris\u00a0: Agalma, 1986.\u00a0\u00a0 David Harvey defines\u00a0 a\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 regime of accumulation as a stabilization over a long period of the allocation of the net product between consumption and accumulation. \u00a0It is associated with a mode of political and social regulation.\u00a0 Its schema of reproduction must be coherent to bring the behavior of all kinds of individuals, capitalists, workers, financiers, political officials, into some kind of configuration that will keep accumulation (i.e. profit making) functioning.\u00a0\u00a0 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. <\/span>Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.\u00a0 Harvey (and I) find it reasonable to say a Fordist\/Keynesian regime of accumulation dominated from approximately 1945 to 1973, and that since then a neoliberal regime of accumulation has arisen.\u00a0 Like Harvey, Fredric Jameson writes of the necessary coherence of culture with the regime of accumulation in among other works Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.<\/span>\u00a0 Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.\u00a0 John Maynard Keynes made a similar point in 1936 when he wrote of the necessity to maintain investor confidence at all costs.\u00a0\u00a0 See Chapter 12 of his General Theory<\/span>\u00a0 op. cit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxvii]<\/a> A good example of such naive ecologism is The Earth Charter. \u00a0See its website www.earthcharterinaction.org.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxviii]<\/a> See the works cited in footnote 1 above, and also my unpublished critique of The Earth Charter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lxxix]<\/a> Rudiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards (eds) compiling a National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report written from a neoliberal point of view in The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America<\/span> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, unintentionally demonstrate the thesis that as long as the basic cultural structures are as they are social justice in the form of income redistribution is incompatible with the central logic and dynamic of the system.\u00a0 The same point is made from a center-left point of view in our Dilemmas of Social Democracies<\/span> previously cited.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxx]<\/a> This same thesis Dornbusch and Edwards demonstrate is made from a center-left point of view in Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger,\u00a0 Dilemmas of Social Democracies<\/span>.\u00a0 Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lxxxi]<\/a> The idea that the older Gemeinschaft \u00a0\u00a0(community) was more human and the modern Gesellschaft\u00a0 alienating was classically promoted by Ferdinand Tonnies and Werner Sombart.\u00a0 They are the grandparents of modern contemporary communitarianisms, for example those of Michael Walzer, \u00a0Alidair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Amitai Etzion that avoid the exaggerations of Tonnies and Sombart and engage in\u00a0 sophisticated debates with contemporary liberals. In the opinion of the present author\u00a0 those debates overlook the key point that as long as systemic imperatives govern in fact it does not matter much what synthesis of liberal and communitarian ideals the wisest philosophers recommend.\u00a0 Tonnies classic 1887 book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft<\/span> is translated as Community and Society. <\/span>\u00a0Mineola NY: Dover, 2002.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lxxxii]<\/a> Durkheim contrasts traditional and modern societies in his doctoral thesis The Division of Labor in Society <\/span>New York; Free Press, 1997.\u00a0 (original French edition 1893) He even draws maps of Europe showing that suicides are more frequent in the areas that are more modernized. He recommends a series of measures to promote social integration (notably professional associations) in modern societies that tend toward disintegration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxxiii]<\/a> Rawls suggests that his own A Theory of Justice<\/span> can fill that gap by providing a meaning for \u201cfraternity\u201d within a broadly Enlightenment framework.\u00a0 Catherine Hoppers and I are suggesting that the problems are deeper than Rawls thinks and will not be solved without integrating indigenous knowledge systems into our worldviews.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxxiv]<\/a> Among the authors who have shown that the dominance of the logic of accumulation tends to be exaggerated by scholars and that even today the majority of the world\u00b4s work is guided by other logics are J-K Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism as we Know it<\/span>.\u00a0 Oxford: Blackwell, 1996;\u00a0 David Korten, Life After Capitalism.<\/span>\u00a0 San Francisco: Berret-Koehler, 2000;\u00a0 Hazel Henderson, Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy.<\/span>\u00a0 White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green, 2006.\u00a0 Nevertheless with Pierre Bourdieu I hold that while it is true that no single logic runs the world, the logic of capital accumulation is influential enough to require special attention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[lxxxv]<\/a> Indeed even sacrificing everything else to the systemic imperative to maximize investor confidence, does not make ungovernable capitalism stable. Every call for more austerity and more inequality for the sake of restoring growth and stability is sooner or later followed by another.\u00a0 This point was classically made with impeccable logic by Rosa Luxemburg in her The Accumulation of Capital.\u00a0 <\/span>London: Routledge, 1963. (first German edition 1913).<\/p>\n

[lxxxvi]<\/a>\u00a0 For an autobiographical account of the origins of quirks in my personality that justify taking a skeptical attitude toward anything I might say see my The Nurturing of Time Future.<\/span>\u00a0 Lake Oswego OR: Dignity Press, 2012.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lxxxvii]<\/a> In Piagetian terms, humans can only learn what they have a schema to assimilate;\u00a0 they cannot accommodate new ideas they are not ready for.\u00a0 My reply to this objection is, of course, that what my co authors and I are proposing is to a large extent\u00a0 reviving old ideas.\u00a0 But maybe this reply is mistaken.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[lxxxviii]<\/a> See Paul D. McLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution.<\/span>\u00a0 New York: Plenum Press, 1990.\u00a0 McLean holds that the oldest parts of the brain are shared with our reptilian relatives and are profoundly conservative, seeking the comfort of repetitive patterns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Society as a whole and the university as a leading part of society need to revive some of the norms of African society prior to European contact. One could say the same about traditional norms in other parts of the world. I mention Africa because we are here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}