The new capitalist accumulation regime and violence in schools
Nildo Viana
Neoliberalism avoids spending on social policies, contributes to the transformation in the production and international exploration process and performs a privatization policy for the benefit of capital. Its maximum is minimal and strong state, ie a state that intervenes minimally and maximally suppress.
Contemporary capitalism has been the scene of a set of transformations that have direct relation to the increase in violence in schools. This set of transformations has its source in the social struggles and capital offensive to increase exploration, since the 60s the average profit rate has been falling. The student revolt of May 68, along with other protesters movements of the time, represented the first symptom of the new period of social struggle and transition to a new regime of accumulation, marked by an offensive in order to resume the pattern of capitalist accumulation.
The new regime of accumulation will sketching and from the 1980s - with the rise and gradual generalization of neoliberalism, the so-called productive restructuring and new international relations constitutive of a neo-imperialism - we have to materialize. These three elements characterize the entire regime of accumulation, called by some "flexible", and cause several changes in civil society, the world of culture and ideology. Neoliberalism avoids spending on social policies, contributes to the transformation in the sphere of production and international exploration and performs a privatization policy for the benefit of capital. Its maximum is minimal and strong state, ie a state that intervenes minimally and maximally suppress. The repressive policy is in the countries of subordinate capitalism, accompanied by remedial policies (quotas, inclusive education system, specific programs for welfare character) that reveal nothing more than a way to try to prevent total delegitimization of the neoliberal state without leaving their logic, that is, without increasing public spending, throwing the responsibility for civil society or benefiting some at the expense of others, such as the quota policy.
The worldwide increase in the prison population is just an expression of the repressive face of neoliberalism, reaching every country in the world (for example, increased 240% in the Netherlands and 140% in Portugal). Needless to mention the situation of the poorest countries and the high rates of hunger, poverty, among others, to see the new context of contemporary global capitalism. The so-called "productive restructuring", expressed in Toyotism and similar models, points to an increase in the surplus value extraction, both absolute and relative, and the hyper-imperialism points to intensified international exploration.
A situation marked by increased exploitation, misery, conflict, deterioration of family relationships and mental health of people, are fundamental to understand the increasing violence at school. Palliative policies or "compensatory" end is conducting a makeup reproduction of unfavorable living conditions of the population instead of proposing real solutions. The increase in violence and its growing presence in schools is a consequence of this state of affairs. The conservative discourse comes to preach the school moralizing and to appeal to individual responsibility and unlink social relations and poverty of violence, playing the American ideologies and enhancing playback of all this deplorable situation and therefore violence in schools.
Article originally published in: A Página da Educação, Portugal, No. 140, Year 13, December 2004.
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