At a time of a worldwide economic reversal,

when the instability and exploitation associated

with capital accumulation is laid bare,

the attack on European “anti-capitalism” is ideological

indoctrination of an old-fashioned capitalist kind

"A Serious Aversion to Capitalism"

The United States and the world economy are now experiencing a major economic setback that began in the financial sector with the bursting of the housing bubble, but which can ultimately be traced back to the basic problems of capitalism arising from class-based accumulation.

Things are clearly much worse, with respect to the general public understanding of these problems, here in the United States, the citadel of capitalism, than elsewhere in the world.

We were therefore bemused by an article entitled Europe’s Philosophy of Failure [excerpt below] by Stefan Theil, Newsweek’s European economics editor, appearing in the January–February 2008 Foreign Policy. here's the introduction:

In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination.

Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias.

Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind.

Theil writes of the “prejudice and disinformation” incorporated in French and German secondary school textbooks dealing with economics. Such textbooks he complains “ingrain a serious aversion to capitalism.”

We quote here, for your amusement and information, some key passages in which Theil displays his outrage over what he calls the “biased commentary on the destruction wreaked by capitalism” to be found in European schoolbooks:

* “Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to...prestigious French universities.

The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues....Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.”

* In another textbook, students actually meet a French entrepreneur who invented a new tool to open oysters. But the quirky anecdote is followed by a long-winded debate over the degree to which the modern workplace is organized along the lines imagined by Frederick Taylor, the father of modern scientific management theory.

* French students...do not learn economics so much as a very specific, highly biased discourse about economics.

When they graduate, they may not know much about supply and demand, or about the workings of a corporation.

Instead, they will likely know inside-out the evils of “la McDonaldisation du monde” and the benefits of a “Tobin tax” on the movement of global capital.

* If there’s one unifying characteristic of German textbooks, it’s the tremendous emphasis on group interests, the traditional social-democratic division of the universe into capital and labor, employer and employee, boss and worker....

Even a cursory look at the country’s textbooks shows that many are written from the perspective of a future employee with a union contract....One 10th-grade social studies text titled FAKT has a chapter on “What to do against unemployment.”

* Equally popular in Germany today are student workbooks on globalization. One such workbook includes sections headed “The Revival of Manchester Capitalism,” “The Brazilianization of Europe,” and “The Return of the Dark Ages.”

In contrast to what he calls the “dangerous indoctrination” of such French and German economic textbooks, which spread “ideology,” “bias,” “disinformation,” and a “doctrine of dissent,” Newsweek’sEuropean economics editor praises the realism, conformity to “conventional wisdom,” and non-ideological nature of U.S. secondary school economics texts.

Thus Theil notes that European economic textbooks are “a world apart from what American high school students learn.”

In the United States “most classes are based on straightforward, [neo-]classical economics.

"In Texas, the state prescribed curriculum requires that the positive contributions of entrepreneurs to the local economy be taught.”

(We do not doubt for a second that the section of the Texas curriculum on Enron embodied in secondary texts is particularly non-ideological and straightforward!)

It is such responsible education in economic basics, Thiel tells us, that helps explain “American success” and “European failure.”

What is most interesting of course is the timing of this Foreign Policy article by Newsweek’s European economics editor.

Published on the cusp of a worldwide economic reversal, in which the instability and exploitation associated with capital accumulation are coming alive for everyone to see, the attack on European “anti-capitalism” appears to be an exercise in ideological indoctrination of an old-fashioned capitalist kind.

The goal of course is to put a stop to all critique of the system. The French and Germans, Theil concludes, should “start paying more attention to what their kids are learning in the classroom.”

The same might be said with considerably more validity and for entirely different reasons of U.S. classrooms. Few in this country are equipped by the schools to understand the harsh realities of capitalism—or the need to rid the world of it.

American Indoctrination

Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation. Educated in schools that teach a skewed ideology, they are exposed to a dogma that runs counter to core beliefs shared by many other Western countries.

They study from textbooks filled with a doctrine of dissent, which they learn to recite as they prepare to attend many of the better universities in the world.

Extracting these children from the jaws of bias could mean the difference between world prosperity and menacing global rifts. And doing so will not be easy.

But not because these children are found in the madrasas of Pakistan or the state-controlled schools of Saudi Arabia. They are not. Rather, they live in two of the world’s great democracies—France and Germany.

What a country teaches its young people reflects its bedrock national beliefs. Schools hand down a society’s historical narrative to the next generation.

There has been a great deal of debate over the ways in which this historical ideology is passed on—over Japanese textbooks that downplay the Nanjing Massacre, Palestinian textbooks that feature maps without Israel, and new Russian guidelines that require teachers to portray Stalinism more favorably.

Yet there has been almost no analysis of how countries teach economics, even though the subject is equally crucial in shaping the collective identity that drives foreign and domestic policies.

Just as schools teach a historical narrative, they also pass on “truths” about capitalism, the welfare state, and other economic principles that a society considers self-evident.

In both France and Germany, for instance, schools have helped ingrain a serious aversion to capitalism.

In one 2005 poll, just 36 percent of French citizens said they supported the free-enterprise system, the only one of 22 countries polled that showed minority support for this cornerstone of global commerce.

In Germany, meanwhile, support for socialist ideals is running at all-time highs—47 percent in 2007 versus 36 percent in 1991.

It’s tempting to dismiss these attitudes as being little more than punch lines to cocktail party jokes. But their impact is sadly and seriously self-destructive.

In Germany, unemployment is finally falling after years at Depression-era levels, thanks in no small part to welfare reforms that in 2005 pressured Germans on the public dole to take up jobs.

Yet there is near consensus among Germans that, despite this happy outcome, tinkering with the welfare state went far beyond what is permissible.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, once heralded as Germany’s own Margaret Thatcher, has all but abandoned her plans to continue free-market reforms.

She has instead imposed a new “rich people tax,” has tightened labor-market rules, and has promised renewed efforts to “regulate” globalization.

Meanwhile, two in three Germans say they support at least some of the voodoo-economic, roll-back-the-reforms platform of a noisy new anti-globalization political party called Die Linke (The Left), founded by former East German communists and Western left-wing populists. More...