Investing in the Self

The American educationalist David Blacker has proposed a challenging thesis about the relation between university education and what he calls ‘the eliminationist project — the neoliberal endgame’.1 His argument derives from a controversial proposition of Karl Marx, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Desperate measures are taken to buck this trend by boosting capital accumulation, typically displacement and technological substitution of labour. Blacker claims that increasing segments of the population are morally written off as no longer exploitable and hence irrelevant to capital accumulation’.2 The validity of Blacker’s abstract thesis would seem to be evident in actual developments since the 1970s: with a decreasing number of manual jobs in the West; with widespread youth unemployment in comparatively wealthy countries; with the growth of precarious and lowly paid employment everywhere; with the scandalously intensive and extensive exploitation of manual labour, especially of young women and children, in low-pay locations; and, more generally, in increased inequality within countries and around the whole world.3