The transcript of Dialogos Radio’s interview with renowned scholar and author Henry Giroux of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, the founder of the “Public Intellectuals Project.” This interview aired on our broadcasts for the week of September 25-October 1, 2014. Find the podcast of this interview here.

MN: Joining us today on Dialogos Radio and the Dialogos Interview Series is professor Henry Giroux, the chair for scholarship in the public interest at MacMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Henry has previously held posts at Boston University, at Miami University in Ohio, and at Penn State University. He is also the author of a number of books, including “Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future,” and “Neoliberalism’s War on Public Education.” He has also made countless television and radio appearances on outlets all across the world. Henry, thank you for joining us on our program today.

HG: It’s my pleasure.

MN: Let’s begin with a discussion about some topics which you’ve spoken and written extensively about…neoliberalism and what you have described as “casino capitalism.” How have these ideas taken hold politically and intellectually across the world in recent years?

HG: I think since the 1970s it’s been the predominant ideology, certainly in Western Europe and North America. Certainly it raised havoc in Latin America, especially in Argentina and Chile and other states. It actually began in Chile as a result of the Chicago Boys…Milton Friedman and that group went down and basically used the Pinochet regime as a type of testing tube to produce a whole series of policies. But I think if we look at his very specifically, we’re talking about a lot of things. We’re talking about an ideology marked by the belief that property is basically the essence, making money basically the essence of democracy, and that consumption is the only applicable form of citizenship. But even more than that, it kind of upholds the notion that the market kind of serves as a model for structuring all social relations: not just the economy but the governing of all of social life. I think that as a mode of governance it is really quite dreadful, because it tends to produce identities, subjects, ways of life driven by a kind of “survival of the fittest” ethic, grounded in the notion of the free, possessive individual and committed to the right of individual and ruling groups to accrue wealth removed from matters of ethics and social cost. That’s a key issue. I mean, this is a particular political and economic and social project that not only consolidates class power in the hands of the 1 percent, but it operates off the assumption that economics can really divorce itself from social cost, that it doesn’t have to deal with matters of ethical and social responsibility, that these things get in the way. And I think we see that in a whole range of policies across the globe. We see the attack on the welfare state, we see the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection between private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, deregulations, the emergence of a kind of rabid individualism, the refusal to tax rich, and really the redistribution of wealth from the middle and working classes to basically the ruling class, the elite class, what the Occupy movement called the one percent. It really has created a very bleak emotional and economic landscape for the 99 percent of the population throughout the world.

MN: And having mentioned this impact on the social state and the 99%, would you go as far as to say that these ideologies have been the direct cause of the economic crisis the world is presently experiencing?

HG: Oh, absolutely. I think when you look at the crisis in 2007, what are you looking at? You’re looking at a kind of pathological greed that implemented banking policies and deregulated the financial world and allowed the financial elite, the one percent, to pursue a series of policies, particularly selling junk bonds and the illegality of what we call subprime mortgages to people who couldn’t pay for them. This created a bubble and it exploded. This is directly related to the assumption that the market should drive all aspects of political, economic, and social life. And what we saw is that it failed, and it not only failed, but it caused an enormous amount of cruelty and hardship across the world. More importantly, it rebounded, and it essentially is entirely unapologetic about what it did, and then it went on, particularly in the United States under the Rubin boys along with Larry Summers and others, and it actually attempted to prevent any policies from being implemented that would have overturned this massively failed policy of deregulation.

MN: Henry, to build on your last point, how has this growth in neoliberal thought and doctrine contributed, in your view, to a democratic deficit nowadays in Europe and the United States?

HG: Democracy has really become two things for, I think, a whole range of anti-democratic politicians, anti-intellectuals, and the people who support these policies. Democracy basically is a word they use, but they empty it out to basically mean that it’s a democracy for the rich, meaning that it’s a term that has nothing to do with questions of justice, nothing to do with questions of rights, nothing to do with questions of legality. As a matter of fact, it becomes a kind of front term, a kind of counterfeit term that’s used to justify a whole range of policies that actually are anti-democratic. It’s oxymoronic. The other side of this is that it hates democracy. Neoliberalism hates democracy. It feeds on inequality, it feeds on privilege, it feeds on massive divisiveness, and it feeds on a theater of cruelty. All you have to do is look at the way it enshrines a kind of rabid individualism. It believes that privatization is the essence of all relationships. It works very hard to eliminate any investment in public values, in public trust. It believes that democracy is something that doesn’t work, and we increasingly see this and we increasingly hear this. What I’m shocked to see about neoliberalism in all of its forms is how utterly unapologetic it is about the misery it produces. And it’s unapologetic not just in that it says “we don’t care, because we have a punishing state that will actually take care of young black kids and dissenting college students and dissenting professors who basically don’t believe in this stuff. But it also blames the very victims that suffer under these policies. I mean, you have the character now, the language of personal responsibility without linking private issues or private troubles to larger public considerations. It’s really pathological. It has an utter disdain for communal relationships, an utter disdain for unions, for public servants, anything to do with the public is seen as the enemy, whether we are talking about public transit or public schools, because these things, in their eyes, should be privatized. They should be sold over, they are seen as assets for which people can make money. They’re not seen as institutions that somehow contribute to a formative culture that’s essential for any viable democracy.

MN: And having mentioned public education just now, a big issue in Greece, as well as in many other countries today, is the increasing privatization of education, and certainly this is something that has been promoted heavily during the crisis in many of these countries. How has neoliberalism and casino capitalism impacted the quality of education and also access to education?

HG: That’s a terrific question. Regarding the quality, it’s dumbed-down education to the point where it literally behaves in a way that’s hard to fathom or understand for anyone who believes that schools should have something to do with creating critically thoughtful, engaged young people who have a sense of their own agency and integrity and possibility to really believe they can make a difference in the world. It tells them that the only thing that really matters is testing, that basically we need to educate people to test. What it’s really saying is that thinking is dangerous. It’s a policy that basically suggests that education is not about creating critically informed young people. It’s really about training. It’s about training for the workplace. It tends to promote a kind of political and ideological conformity, it’s a depoliticizing process, and it’s also oppressive, because it removes from education any sense of vision that suggests that education is really about thinking about a future that doesn’t repeat the worst dimensions of the present. I think in that sense, this emphasis on rote memorization, this emphasis on testing, this emphasis on discipline…many of these schools are being turned into military academies, many high schools, particularly in Chicago. I think that what it does is that it ignores all those basic problems that matter, in which schools have to be understood in order to be reformed. And that is whether we’re talking about inequality, whether we’re talking about poverty, whether we’re talking about racism. Kids can’t learn if they’re hungry. Kids can’t learn if they find themselves in schools where there are no resources. Kids can’t learn in classes that have 40 students in them. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. And I think that what you really need to figure out is that the right knows this. This is not just a kind of willful ignorance. This is a very systemic policy to make sure that if education is going to matter, it’s going to matter for the elite. It’s not going to matter for everybody else, in the sense of offering the best possible resources and capabilities that it can offer.

MN: So would you go as far as saying that education, and particularly higher education today, actually reinforce neoliberal doctrine inside the classroom?

HG: I don’t think there’s any question about this. You can pick up the paper every day and read the idiocy that comes out of the mouths of these administrators, whether you’re talking about Texas or Arizona or New England. The university is being corporatized in a way that we’ve never seen before. And we know what that means, we know what the conditions are that are producing this. At one level you have right-wing governors and you have basically a center-right president and you have a bunch of democrats who really should be “republicans lite,” who really believe that we can defund education, while at the same time funding their jets, such as the F-35 strike fighter jet, which costs, by the way, about one hundred million dollars apiece. That they will not provide funds to allow education to be free for every kid in the United States. In 10 years, it’s going to cost a trillion dollars for these jets, and they don’t work, they can’t fly in the rain. I mean, the military budget is bloated, it’s the largest in the world, you can combine the next 25 military budgets, they don’t add up to the cost of America’s military budget. So you have this misappropriation of money. It’s not that we don’t have the money for education, it’s how we appropriate those funds. We don’t appropriate them in the interest of young people. We don’t appropriate them in the interest of education. And so, as education is being defunded, what happens is that you have these business models now being incorporated at the university which calls, for instance, administrators “CEOs.” And by the way, as you know, they’re the largest-rising group in education in the United States. Administrators now outnumber faculty, and they’re draining huge amounts of resources away from students. Secondly, of course, faculty have lost power. They’re abolishing unions, dissent is being cracked down in ways that are abominable and reminders of the McCarthy period, you have faculty who basically are being defined by the degree to which they can write grants, subjects that don’t lend themselves immediately to training are going to cost more for students in states like Texas. Texas went so far as to claim that it would lower tuition for those faculties and courses that lent themselves directly to business interests. Can you imagine? While raising the tuition for courses in the humanities and the liberal arts which these right-wing governors claim contribute nothing to the economy. And of course students, on the other hand, are now seen as consumers. They’re not seen as important investments in the future, and particularly a democratic future. They’re just seen as slots, and that’s why there’s a big push in the universities for foreign students, because they’re a cash cow. I think the university is in crisis, and it’s in a terrible crisis over what’s going on in terms of its inability to really take advantage of a mission that in the 50s and 60s, for all of its contradictions and all of its problems, at least had a sense that it was more than simply a job training opportunity or that the university was more than an adjunct of the military-industrial complex.

MN: Henry, building on what you said about the university being in crisis, how has this shift that has taken place impacted education specifically in the liberal arts and the humanities, and how has it impacted the job market for academics? There are many in Greece, for instance, who view an academic career overseas as a “way out” of the crisis in their country.

HG: I think two things have happened. I think that the liberal arts and the humanities are being seen as useless. They don’t correlate well with the notion of the university as a factory. They don’t correlate well with the university as a place that really is less interested in teaching kids how to think critically than it is about teaching them how to be semi-skilled workers. And it doesn’t work well with the governing structure in the university that, in some fundamental ways, says “hey look, power is basically in the hands of CEOs, it’s a business culture, we’ll tell you what to do.” And matters of vision and matters of critique and matters of analysis are not simply invested in humanities and the liberal arts, but liberal arts and the humanities have a long history of supporting those ideals. Those ideals are not simply not in favor at this moment in higher education, except for the elite schools, they basically are scorned, they get in the way, they create problems for administrators who don’t want cranky faculty, who don’t want students basically learning how to think, who don’t want to mimic the traditions that went on in the 1960s. They’re utterly petrified over what happened in the 1960s. Not only did you have students demanding all kinds of things, from more inclusive courses, eliminating the racism, making schools more democratic, but you opened up schools—and this relates to your second question—you opened up schools in ways that allowed for the education of a variety of subordinate groups were excluded from education. This utterly petrified the right. The fact that blacks, that minorities, that immigrants could become educated was a terrifying assumption for many right-wingers, to say the least. I think what we see now, and you have to connect the dots here…remember, you have a Republican Party in the United States that is doing everything it can to violate the Voting Rights Act. It’s trying to limit, as much as possible, the ability of Black people to vote. Think about how that correlates so easily with making sure that tuitions are so high in the schools that you exclude working-class people, poor minorities, people who are considered disposable, people who basically would never be able to afford, unless they had adequate funds, adequate grants, adequate scholarships. This is really not just about a predatory economic system trying to redistribute wealth from students to administrators to the military-industrial complex or the financial elite. It’s also basically about a systemic policy of exclusion. So yes, I think there are questions of opportunity, as tuitions get raised to unbelievable heights, and you have endless students who can’t get in because the tuition is too high, or you have students who will be saddled with debt for the rest of their lives in a way that they would never even imagine going into public service, because it basically doesn’t provide the salaries that the private market does. I think when you begin to put these dots together, you begin to see how crucial education is to the neoliberal project.

MN: People in Greece oftentimes have this perception that the international media operates on a very objective and credible basis…how do you see the media’s role, however, in reinforcing this system of neoliberalism and casino capitalism?

HG: I think it’s silly, it borders on being silly if not utterly naive to assume that the media is somehow removed from questions of power. In the United States, the statistics are very clear. You have six major companies that control the media. The media is in the hands of corporate power. Whether we’re talking about Fox News or any of these other right-wing groups, the Murdochs that control the media…where do you see left-wing analysis in the dominant media? Almost never. But if you look at the new media, if you look at alternative media, like the radio station I’m on right now, there is a new space that’s opened up and that’s very, very encouraging, and it speaks to the cracks in the system and the inability of the system, in light of these new technologies, to be able to wage the type of control that they have in the past. So in spite of that concentrated economic power in the media, which is far from objective and unbiased—as I said, that’s silly, the media is entirely tuned in to maintaining our class system at any cost, and whether that means completely destroying a country like Greece, or Spain, or Portugal, or Chile, or Argentina, they have no trouble with that, they don’t think twice about that. These people are basically ideological lackeys. They’re in the service of the financial elite, and that’s what they do, they do their job. But to claim that they’re objective, that makes no sense to me.

MN: From a political point of view, we’ve seen a rising tide of authoritarianism and official far-right parties making electoral gains in recent years in numerous countries On the other hand, we’ve perhaps seen a failure of the left to respond to this new political climate. How would you characterize the response of the global left to this trend that we have been discussing?

HG: I think there are three things missing from the left that need to be addressed. I think we need to be careful in assuming that the left has failed, as much as the left is learning as quickly as it possibly can what it needs to do in light of policies that it’s used in the past that don’t basically work anymore, in a world in which politics has become globalized. And I think the three things are this: first, I believe that the left has to become an international left. Power is now separated from politics, meaning that power is global and politics is local, so that local politics really has very little power, states really have very little power over corporate sovereignty anymore. They can’t control it, it has an allegiance to no one, it floats above national boundaries. So we have to begin to think about ways to create movements, laws, policies that actually deal with this kind of global network of power. That’s the first thing. Secondly, I think the left has to take the question of education seriously. Education is not marginal to politics, it’s central to politics! If we can’t create the formative culture globally that allows people to understand that their interests are being trampled on, that they live in a political system that has been constructed by human beings and can be overturned by human beings, but also, a political, economic, and social system that has nothing to do with their needs, that basically exploits their needs. Thirdly, it seems to me that the left has got to get beyond demonstrations. I mean, it’s got to come up with an international vision of what it wants to do, flexible and it can work in associations, but it’s got to have an organization that basically is going to have some clout, and in some cases that means it can be involved in local elections, and in some cases it can develop third parties, and in some cases it can work with NGOs. But it’s got to take the question of power seriously. Power is not just a one-shot deal. It doesn’t mean you demonstrate in the street with 200,000 people and then you walk away. It’s got to become more systemic. We need more than what my friend Stanley Roberts calls “signpost politics,” the politics of banners. That’s good, it draws attention, that’s a pedagogical moment, but we have to go far beyond that. We need to create ideologically, politically, educationally, international organizations that can begin to bring their weight to bear on this global politics that now controls basically state politics and nations all across the world.

MN: Henry, before we wrap up, where can our listeners find out more details about you, your work, and especially the Public Intellectuals Project which you founded if I’m not mistaken.

HG: Yes, I did…the Public Intellectuals Project is located at truth-out.org, and if you go there, you’ll see on the right, there’s something called the Public Intellectuals Project, and if you click on it, what you get is a whole series of articles now being written by intellectuals all over the world, who are addressing very important social issues in accessible language. Seriousness is not being compromised, it’s just being made accessible, but it’s also being linked to issues that really matter. Secondly, I hate to be self-promoting, but I have a website that I think is important. It’s www.henryagiroux.com, and anybody who is interested in my work, all of my work is listed there. And so I think that if there is a concern about some of the things we are talking about, please, go there, and you have access to a whole range of information.

MN: Henry, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today here on Dialogos Radio and the Dialogos Interview Series.

HG: Thank you very much for interviewing me.

Please excuse any typos or errors which may exist within this transcript.

Copyright Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.