Peter McLaren in an interview with Ravi Kumar
“Exploitation is normalized institutionally when a small minority (the capitalists) monopolize the means of production, and workers must rely on wage labor at the behest of the capitalists. This inequity is preserved and reproduced by the state. The presence of the unemployed pressure employed workers, ensuring that they will work unremittingly hard to produce for the capitalists. So an anti-capitalist curriculum begins with the struggle for morality, which can only occur outside of capital’s value form. Equality is impossible under capitalism since under capitalism it is the quality of labor power that is paramount, not the equalization of labor power.”
I
Ravi Kumar: You have been in the forefront of revolutionary critical pedagogy along with other social scientists. Where does the break happen in the works of revolutionary critical pedagogues from that of earlier educationists – the neo-Marxists like Michael Apple or critical pedagogues such as Henry Giroux?
Peter McLaren: I don’t see it so much as a break or rupture as coming to a fork in the road, a fortuitous crossroads of sorts — and deciding to take a different path, recognising that the journey I had taken with fellow critical educators had been a long and arduous one, freighted with travails and tribulations, a voyage where a lot of learning had taken place and many important struggles had been initiated. Apple’s work was important to me as a graduate student because it was a clear exposition of a neo-Marxist analysis of the North American curriculum and policy initiatives and Giroux’s work — where I find more similarities to Zygmant Bauman, Castoriadis, and the Frankfurt school than to the revolutionary Marxist tradition out of which my more recent work has emerged — remains important to me to this day; I consider Henry one of the most insightful and protean scholars on the topic of youth culture and one of the most illuminating critics of contemporary social formations, including the blood-sucking behemoth we refer to as neo-liberal capitalism. His creative and brilliant work on so many topics has inspired an entire generation of intellectuals. What’s different among us? Well, I think many things, and I would point to the most significant as my preoccupation with the writings of Marx, my hoisting of class as a central concept in teacher education, and the creation of socialism for the twenty-first century and linking education to the worldwide struggle for socialism, and working towards the instauration of Marxist educational theory in North America, along with a few fellow travellers. That path was opened up to me, in part, by the work of British educationalists Dave Hill, Mike Cole, Glenn Rikowski and Paula Allman. Back in the mid 1980s, Mike Cole challenged me to subject my own work to a Marxist critique and I am glad that I obliged. Now I think your question leads to a more important question — what differentiates my work in general from the progressive tradition in North America? In the early 1990s I was working from a perspective I called critical postmodernism — the term critical postmodernism or resistance postmodernism was used, after Teresa Ebert, to distinguish it from ‘ludic postmodernism’ or the postmodernism of the spectacle, of the theatrical apparatuses of the state, the politics of representation and the propaganda of desire, a pedagogy of “arousal effect”, a kind of micro-resistance linked to a secret museum of academic codes and codices that existed within culture where culture’s mystified nature could be explored and a politics of negation unleashed, the aim of which was to produce a well-tempered radical where the alienation of everyday life under capitalism was seen as not so bad because it was suffered by good people. I was concerned that, among the cultural avant-garde, questions of class became ideationally sequestered from internal scrutiny — there existed a proclivity to self-censorship related to questions of class because the working class in their role as organic intellectuals were relegated to the role of cultural workers, and needed tutelage in the spaces of the vanguard regarding questions of cultural production whereas questions of class were deemed to be self-evident and to some extent too inevitable.
Now I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I don’t think culture is very important, since culture is linked to ways of “living out” historically specific antagonisms and relations of subordination. Given that the politics of liberation is headquartered in critical consciousness and ignited by revolutionary praxis where historical agents transform themselves through their struggles, I became interested in pedagogical spaces that could make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, more specifically in the sense of accounting for the “rich totality of many determinations” that Marx talks about. In other words, I tried to do a number of things: to understand how a distracted and indifferent subjectivity (that led to critics bemoaning the superficiality of modern life), one that remains blasé to shifts and changes within a moving modernity, can be invited into new perceptions of the social self by building a critical lexicon gleaned from the critical literature; to make the subterranean or oblivious workings of capital more conspicuous to teachers and educators, to conceive of the concept of praxis as ontologically important, and examine history not as something already written or hardwired into predicated or predictable outcomes but open to change once certain ideological and material conditions are superseded and fetishized everyday life grasped dialectically (i.e, those conditions that shape and educate our desires surreptitiously or in tacit ways). I wanted to add some dialectical flesh to the progressive bones of critical pedagogy (which had becoming increasingly domesticated, as Paulo Freire was turned into a type of benevolent, almost Santa Claus figure), and tried to give this flesh an almost raucous, ribald and garrulous physicality through an eclectic writing style — without becoming trapped in a phenomenology of sensation or seduction. I tried to understand in theoretical terms, what gives our desires direction? And, of course: What is the direction of our desiring? I became interested in the notion that human beings form reality in the process of becoming human, that praxis determines human beings in their totality, in other words, that praxis distinguishes the human from the non-human, which is something Karel Kosik talked about in his work on the dialectics of the concrete. Following Kosik, I became interested in the movements of the world’s totality and how this totality is uncovered by human beings, and how, in our uncovering this totality, we develop a particular openness towards being. How can we discover ourselves as historical beings? The results of our actions in and on and through the world do not coincide with our intentions. Why is this? What accounts for the disharmony between the necessity and the freedom of our actions as human beings creating and being created by historical forces? These are questions that motivated my thinking, and still do. Do we make history or does history make us? Or do both occur simultaneously? I do not believe we are summoned by some higher power to create historical outcomes but that, following Marx, we make history. Kosik saw this as the interconnection of the objectified and objectivised praxis of humankind.
This praxis in the form of production forces, forms of thought, language, etc., exists as historical continuity only because of the activity of human beings. But this objectified and objectivised praxis has a form, and it is this form which is fixed in human history and seems over time to be more real than human reality itself and becomes the basis for historical mystification, for what Kosik refers to as the basis of the possibility of inverting a subject into an object. So, in effect, this forms the possibility for ideological mystification, for the ideological state apparatuses, all the way to the current kind of totalitarianism we had under the Bush administration ruled by the “big lie” – a lie that enters people’s heads as if it were a metaphysical being, a mystical substance in which human beings seek a guarantee against chaos, against chance, against the everyday contingency of life. So that every individual enters conditions not of their own making, and there is a dialectic we must uncover between individuals and those conditions that are given for every generation, epoch and class. And as Kosik noted, we can transcend these conditions but not primarily in our consciousness and intentions but through our praxis. We get to know the world by actively interfering in it. We discover our revolutionary ethics in the process of our objectification and our resistance to it. I tried to convey to my students that economics is not some nomothetic discipline but an ethic — a moral philosophy — that is perverse because of the way it deals with practical human relationships through its frenzy to maximise profits. I became interested in the work of Raya Dunayevskaya and her notion of absolute negativity. Absolute negativity, in Raya’s sense of the term, does not refer simply to an endless series of negations but a negation that can free itself from the object of its critique. Raya discovered this in Hegel. Hegel worked with a type of self-referential negation, which was modified by Marx. By negating itself, negation establishes a relation with itself and is freed from dependence on the external object — so this type of negativity, since it exists without relation to another outside itself is absolute — it is absolved from dependence on the other. This type of negation has negated its dependence on an external object. Marx critically appropriated this concept to explain the path to communist society. As Peter Hudis has explained, Marx via Hegel understood that to negate something still leaves us dependent on the object of critique. The alienated object is simply affirmed on a different level. So when you look at revolutions of the past, you see that they were still trapped by the objects that they tried to negate. They didn’t fully negate their negations, so to speak. Along these lines, Peter Hudis notes that communism is the negation of capitalism but as such it was still dependent on the object of its critique insofar as it replaced private property with collective property. Communism thus was not free from the alienated notion that ownership is the most important part of being human. Ownership was still affirmed, but on a different level. Of course, it was good to negate private property but this did not go far enough to pave the way to a truly new, a truly positive society. In order to meet this challenge, you need a human praxis that can achieve the transcendence of alienation. And this necessitates a subjective praxis connected with a philosophy of liberation that is able to illuminate the content of a post-capitalist society and convincing the popular majorities that it is possible to resolve the contradictions between alienation and freedom. Now it is clear that attempts to concretise absolute negativity as a new beginning rather than repeating the mistakes of an earlier era have been halted by the forces of colonisation and imperialism. Ramon Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonaldo-Torres, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano and others are writing cogently and presciently about the coloniality of being in this regard, where the epistemological genocide linked to the Eurocentric forces of colonisation, and economic exploitation linked to capitalism, are demonstrated to be co-constitutive of plundering the oppressed (invented non-beings) of their alterity, their liberty, and their humanity — where, as Enrique Dussel notes, indigenous peoples have become but free labour for a colonial tributary system linked historically to European capital. I am interested in the historical process of the European ego’s missionary sense (I discover, I conquer and I evangelise) and ontological sense (I think) and how this links up to the concept of the transnational capitalist class and the transnational state apparatus as developed by William Robinson.
RK: Freire, with whom you have worked and whose ideas you have critically used in your works, has been used by different shades of intellectuals and even agencies that sustain the rule of capital. What is it that allows the use of Freire’s works/ideas by them and what difference does it make when you use his ideas in your works?
PM: Well, I make no claim to a ‘purer’ interpretation of Freire’s work. I think of the influence that Karel Kosik’s Dialectics of the Concrete had on Freire, and I think we can understand Freire best when we see his work in terms of how he fashioned the notion of praxis. In this respect, I would argue that Freire’s work has been flensed by liberals. The politics of his praxis has been pasteurized. The supreme postulate — the unity of theory and practice — is upheld by liberals and criticalists alike —but the original philosophical questioning (at least within materialist philosophy) that formed the conditions of possibility for revolutionary praxis has disappeared. Thus, as Kosik notes, the unity of theory and praxis has come to be realised and grasped in different epochs in very different ways. Liberals often deal with the pseudo-concrete when utilizing praxis — they view it in terms of addressing the practical applications of pedagogical theory, or something like that, in which the focus is on the subjective consciousness of the individual. Praxis in the way I understand it, via Freire, and others, is the ontological process of becoming human. Reality manifests itself in this becoming, in this onto-formative process of becoming, in which the practice of being human forms and interprets reality. So praxis, as Kosik points out, is a specific mode of being that determines humans in their totality.
A specific mode of being, praxis becomes a way of transcending our finitude and helps us to constitute our relationship to the totality of human existence. Many approaches to knowledge limit the notion of praxis, fetishize it, and turn it into some kind of technique of learning. Here, formal logic replaces dialectical logic. This goes against a materialist philosophy of praxis in which praxis is viewed as an onto-formative process, as the historical mediation of spirit and matter, of theory and action, epistemology and ontology. Here we need to talk about revolutionary praxis, denouncing oppression and dialectically inaugurating new forms of social, educational and political relationships. Clearly, reflecting on our practice means finding ways of organising and activating our pedagogical relationships so that the oppressed become protagonists in their historical formation. Freirean praxis is oriented towards socialist relationships and practices, and this has been jettisoned by liberals. Revolutionary praxis is, if Marx’s stresses are taken into account, is not some arche-strategy of political performance undertaken by academic mountebanks in the semiotics seminar room but instead is about “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change”. It is through our own activities that we develop our capacities and capabilities. We change society by changing ourselves and we change ourselves in our struggle to change society. The act of knowing is always a knowing act. It troubles and disturbs the universe of objects and beings, it can’t exist outside of them; it is interactive, dialogical. We learn about reality not by reflecting on it but by changing it. Paying attention to the simultaneous change in circumstances and self-change and creating a new integrated worldview founded upon a new social matrix – what I call socialism – is how I understand revolutionary movement as praxis.
RK: The works of revolutionary critical pedagogues have been often critiqued as non-viable, as ideals which cannot be achieved. Their works are also critiqued on the grounds that they do not talk much about curriculum, teacher training, classroom transactions or students psychology. Rather they are seen as arguing against imperialism and capitalism or resistance against capitalism. How would you respond to such critiques?
PM: I think there is some truth to this criticism. But there are several ways to look at this dilemma. First and foremost, if there are no other critical educators addressing neo-liberal capitalism and imperialism, specifically from a Marxist perspective, or dealing systematically with what Anibal Quijano and Ramon Grosfoguel call the “coloniality of power” then it is obvious revolutionary critical educators need to be up to this task. Clearly, the copious offerings of the postmodern left have remained regnant in the education literature, Hardt and Negri’s work on the immateriality of labour, the multitude, and Foucault’s work on the archaeology of power, etc. Joining these are neo-Weberian approaches to class. There are, in my mind, too few Marxist analyses available for students to engage within the educational field, although perhaps it is different in India, and I know that it is different in England with the work of Dave Hill, Mike Cole, Glenn Rikowski, Paula Allman, and others gaining worldwide visibility. So in terms of my own work, I have been trying to address issues that you and colleagues in England and elsewhere have been addressing for a much longer time. My task, along with other North American critical educators, has been to try to give the anti-capitalist movement relevance for North American educators. One theme that has dominated my work has been a Marxist critique of global capitalism. The sociologist Willian I. Robinson argues that we have a global capitalist system that has entered a new phase during the last two decades – what we have come to call neo-liberal capitalism. Obviously we need to mount a politics of resistance. Social and political forces are still needed to challenge state power at the national level. It is wrong to think that there is no more need to talk about state power or the need for political organisations that can cooperate in civil society as well as in political society. We have two extremes at the current historical juncture: the old model of the vanguard party overthrowing the state (the vertical model) and the civil societarian position about changing the world without taking state power. Enrique Dussel points out that asking whether or not it is possible “to change the world without taking power” is the wrong question. Power, notes Dussel, can’t be “taken” as it were a “thing”. Power belongs to the political community, to the people, as it were. Power can be exercised institutionally by representative delegates of the community but the question remains – in whose interests do these institutions serve? Dussel argues,
The package of State institutions (potestas) needs to be untied and changed as a whole by conserving what is sustainable and eliminating what is unjust – thereby creating the new. Power (as potestas) is not “taken” en bloc. It is reconstituted and exercised critically in view of the material satisfaction of needs, in fulfilment of the normative demands of democratic legitimacy, and within empirical political possibility. But to be clear, without the obediential exercise of delegated institutional power the world cannot feasibly be changed. To attempt to do so is little more than abstract and apolitical moralism and idealism, which clearly results from practical and theoretical confusions.
And Robinson is correct in positing a crucial remaining question: What types of political vehicles will “interface” between popular forces and state structures? What’s the relationship between the social movements of the left, the state, and political organisations? Previously the relationship was vertical (cultivating a top-down hierarchy), now it’s horizontal (cultivating democratic social relations from the ground up). So what will eventually replace the neo-liberal model? Market capitalist models? Reformist models that will sustain the rule of capital? What are the forms of organisation we need to resist the rule of capital? At the level of the state as well as the public sphere. What political vehicles can the popular majorities create that can interface between popular forces and state structures? How can popular forces utilise state power in order to transform the state and bring about a socialist alternative to the capitalist law of value? According to Robinson, previously there was a vertical model. In the last 15 or 20 years, the emphasis has been on horizontal relations, networking among different social groups, and bringing about democratic relations from the ground up via participatory democratic forms of organisation. Here, indigenous organisations have taken the lead. We need countervailing forces from below – popular forces and movements of popular majorities from below that can put pressure on the state (where global forces pressure even revolutionary governments to moderate structural change), even when the state is working towards socialist ideals such as the case of Venezuela. What are the pedagogical implications in all of this? How can we look at critical pedagogy as a social movement, as a broad coalition of groups? How do we define pedagogy in this context? How is critical pedagogy a force for change that exists as much outside of schools as within them? These are questions that need exploring. And there are too few of us in the field of education engaging these questions.
Let’s take another important theme. In addition to challenging the neo-liberal globalisation of capital, revolutionary critical educators need to address the concept of colonialism. Anibal Quijano, for instance, notes that with the help of capitalism, the idea of race helped to yoke the world’s population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people and it became a central construct in creating and reproducing the international division of labour, including the global system of patriarchy. He writes how, historically, slavery, serfdom, wage labor, and reciprocity all functioned to produce commodities for the world market – and this “colonial power matrix” (“patrón de poder colonial”) came to affect all dimensions of social existence such as sexuality, authority, subjectivity and labour. Berkeley professor Ramon Grosfoguel conceptualises this as a historical-structural heterogeneous totality that by the late 19th century came to cover the whole planet. Grosfoguel has described the coloniality of power as an entanglement of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (“heterarchies”) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures. As race and racism became the organising principle that structured all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system, different forms of labour that were articulated to capitalist accumulation at a world scale were assigned according to this racial hierarchy. Cheap, coercive labor was carried out by non-European people in the periphery and “free wage labor” was exercised by people of European descent in the core. Such has been the case up to the present day. Grosfoguel makes an important case that, contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to the economic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but a constitutive part of the broad entangled “package” called the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. Now as revolutionary critical educators, we need to examine class struggle in the context of the production of the coloniality of power. This is an important project. So yes, this is a lot of theoretical work, and the basic arguments need to be laid out before we can build a curriculum that can address these issues and more work needs to be done before we can mine their implications for teacher education, curriculum, and a psychology of liberation. When we look at psychology, we can look to the pioneering work of Frantz Fanon and, of course, Ignacio Martín-Baró, the Jesuit priest who was murdered by the US-backed military forces of El Salvador. Of course, some educators are addressing the issue of decolonising pedagogy at the level of the classroom, of decolonising the curriculum, and this is important work. It is not that works addressing these themes have not been done before for many years. It’s just that when new questions and configurations arise at the level of global politics, we need to examine their implications from both geopolitical and micropolitical perspectives, using new conceptual schema and utilising empirical work being done on the ground. And putting it all together.
But, a single revolutionary critical educator would find it difficult to do everything you mention in your question all at once – to put implications for curriculum planning, for learning theory, for psychology, for teacher education, for pedagogical approaches in the classroom all in one book, or one study, for instance. I like to see revolutionary critical education as a collective enterprise. Some critical educators are writing about classroom issues, others are looking at the curriculum. I am writing more on a “macro” level, trying to develop a coherent philosophy of praxis – and of course I benefit from the work being done by critical educators worldwide. If I were a pre-service student in a teacher education programme, obviously reading a book by McLaren would not be enough to answer so many important pressing questions that classroom practitioners need to address. The key would be to read educators who can give you some philosophical foundations, including the concept of revolutionary praxis, some historical foundations, ethical and epistemological foundations, and some multicultural foundations that include issues around gender and patriarchy and sexuality and disability, and foundations for developing critical classroom practices, including eco-pedagogy and teaching for a sustainable biosystemic future. We are a collective effort. People sometimes want me, or some other revolutionary critical educator, to do everything in a single text. The key is not to look for a single source but to appropriate critically from a wide expanse of revolutionary critical discourses – inside and outside of the educational literature. Here in the US we have a field called educational foundations. But you don’t see programmes called educational foundations as much today as when I began teaching in schools of education a number of decades ago. I think we need to revive educational foundations, and try to revision them as critical educational foundations programmes.
The state is not a neutral site, and what we need to challenge is how capital has shaped it and how it is shaping capital. Civil society is part of the state and is not an autonomous region that miraculously floats above the messy world of class antagonisms. Many progressive educators fail to realise this. So what happens? In their refusal to move beyond reclamation of the public sphere and an embracing of an anaemic and abstract conception of democracy and freedom, they unwittingly reflect the leftist face of the capitalist class in which appearances are created and preserved while reality is eroded. For me, the struggle is about building a socialism of the concrete, not an abstract utopia, a radical democracy of the abstract spawned by a revivified civil society. And we all have been remiss is failing to spell out what this means, what this could be like. That is the challenge for some of us, and until we develop a coherent direction of where to go AFTER capital, then we will be trapped in a leftist neo-liberalism, and that is a very perilous place for humanity to be.
II
RK: How do you analyse the current recession as a pedagogue? How do you see it as a teacher-worker affecting the educational scenario?
PM: Teachers need to develop anti-capitalist pedagogies. They need to involve their students in a discussion of the current global economic crisis — and not be afraid to use the word “capitalism.” We need to stress the “class” dimension of the crisis in Marxian terms. We need to enter into discussions about how capitalism works and how the question of politics pervades questions of the economy and the distribution of wealth and class power. And how all these questions have a moral dimension (can morality exist within capitalism?) as well as a political basis. There is a tremendous fear about socialism in the US these days, but we must remember that the ruling class only fears socialism for the poor because the entire system is protected via socialism for the rich, a system that is comfortably in place — although it needs to be unmasked as socialism for the rich. The great US polymath, Gore Vidal, pointed out that the US government prefers that “public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich” and we can clearly discern the truth in that statement when we look at the recent nationalisation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac where you can see clearly that the US is a country where there exists socialism for the rich and privatisation for the poor, all basking in what Nouriel Roubini calls “the glory of unfettered Wild West laissez-faire jungle capitalism” – and what Marxist theorist David Harvey argues has led to “a financial Katrina”— that has allowed the biggest debt bubble in history to fester without any control, causing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Indeed, socialism is only condemned when it profits the poor and the powerless and threatens the rich. But capitalists are quick to embrace a socialism for the rich — which really is what neo-liberal capitalism is all about. But of course, it’s called free-market capitalism and is seen as synonymous with the struggle for democracy. But free-market ideology cannot fix a crisis created by free-market ideology. I look around me to the decaying infrastructures of the cities here and I feel I am living in some kind of slow-motion demolition of civilisation, in a film noir comic book episode where denizens of doom inhabit quasi-feudal steampunk landscapes of wharfs and warehouses and rundown pubs, roaches sliding off laminated table cloths, in an atmosphere of dog-eat-dog despair. Those whose labour is exploited in the production of social wealth — that is, the wage and salaried class — are now bearing most of the burden of the current economic crisis in the US and, quite simply, what is called for is a mass uprising like we saw in Argentina in 2001-2002 when four presidents were forced out in less than three weeks, like we saw in Venezuela when the popular majorities rescued President Hugo Chavez during a CIA-supported coup, or like we saw in Bolivia, when the indigenous peoples put Evo Morales in power or what we are seeing in Iceland, in Latvia, in Greece, in South Korea today. We need to cry “”¡Que se vayan todos!” (“All of them must go!”) And flush contemporary deregulated capitalism down the toilet. But the interminably overcast political world and the media/videosphere in the US provide the US public with what Paul Valéry described as “the succour of that which does not exist” – in this case, a belief that free-market capitalism is still the best of all possible systems and needed to keep democracy safe from the feral hordes of barbarians who might turn to the evil of socialism if we are not vigilant in protecting our way of life. As educators, we are faced with a tough challenge in teaching about and against capitalism.
William Tabb notes that the system itself created this crisis by floating the stock of new companies that promised to invest in high technology. Prices rose so high that the stock market came crashing down. When the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates and kept lowering them, it became easier for companies and individuals to borrow and it helped people pay off debt and borrow more and low-interest mortgages made home ownership cheaper. As housing prices rose and kept rising, mortgage originators gave out easy loans with little or no down payment as well as low teaser-rate loans, which would reset in the future, were offered, and interest-only mortgages became common. Adjustable-rate mortgages allowing borrowers to make very low initial payments for the first years became popular. The banks learned to securities these loans by selling the collateralised debt obligations to someone else who would receive the income. You would get paid up-front with money you could lend to still more borrowers. Tabb tells us that between mid-2000 and 2004, American households took on three trillion dollars in mortgages while the US private sector borrowed three trillion dollars from the rest of the world. Almost a half of the mortgages were financed with foreign money. And when the Securities and Exchange Commission changed the rules to allow investment banks to take on a great deal more risk, we saw the collapse of Wall Street as we have known it. When the big investment banks received an exemption from regulation limiting the amount of debt they could take on, they borrowed and invested more in relation to the actual capital the bank possessed. But they ran out of money when things went bad. This is what happens when you put your faith in the magic of the market (the market is the singular most important deity in the US) allow banks to self-regulate. Social regulation in the public interest is, and has always been — an anathema to the ruling class, or the transnational capitalist class, however you describe the guardians of the interest of capital. The ruling class and its powerful fractions of capital put the blame on too much governmental regulation — not too little — with respect to the current crisis just at a time when we need strong government action.
Because of the credit squeeze, businesses cannot get sufficient credit and so are cutting back on investment, on payroll, on employees and are not pursuing strategies to help working people — why aren’t mortgage rates being lowered to let people stay in their homes? Why is money being thrown at the banks when they need to be nationalised and reorganised? We need to move to direct job creation, not giving tax breaks to corporations doing business in the US. As Tabb notes, minimising or eliminating their tax burden leaves the working people to pay more. Tabb is correct in arguing that the issue of class power and the structural nature of capitalism as a system of class domination have to be brought front and centre — we need to critique the very class structure of capitalism. If we wish the patterns of taxation and pro-corporate policy we need greater social control over capital with its recurring crises and unpredictable cycles and chronic instability and a complete rethinking of the system in terms of what economic democracy really means for the wretched of the earth.
Given the nature of capitalism, and primed by the laws of capitalist competition and accumulation, capitalists are forced to produce a surplus product in order to produce surplus value; and in order to generate even more surplus value, must be reinvested and this continued reinvestment expands surplus production and there exists a continual need to discover spaces for surplus production. Capitalists are in continual search for new means of production as well as natural resources and the necessity of raw-material extraction has led to what some have called the new imperialism. What we need, obviously, is a non-capitalist class structure.
We are entering a period where leftist educators must play an important role in the global struggle with finance capital.
The most important approach to discussing the crisis in capitalism has been developed, in my view, by Glenn Rikowksi in his discussion of the social production of labour-power as this relates to education. “Labour-power” is the potential or ability of workers to work, it is the latent value (or the promise of creating value possessed by human labour) that has not yet been expended. “Labour” is the actual activity of producing value. The profit, or what Marx refers to as surplus value, arises when workers do more labour than is necessary to pay the cost of hiring their labour-power.
Exploitation is normalised institutionally when a small minority (the capitalists) monopolise the means of production, and workers must rely on wage labour at the behest of the capitalists. This inequity is preserved and reproduced by the state. The presence of the unemployed pressure employed workers, ensuring that they will work unremittingly hard to produce for the capitalists. So an anti-capitalist curriculum begins with the struggle for morality, which can only occur outside of capital’s value form. Equality is impossible under capitalism since under capitalism it is the quality of labour-power that is paramount, not the equalization of labour-power. These are issues that need to be explored. Glenn Rikowski puts it this way:
In capital’s social universe, ‘values’ have no substance, but value is the substance. Morality, is the struggle for morality, the struggle to make it real, and this can only be a possibility (still only a possibility) in the movements of society post-capitalism. Moral critiques of capitalism are in themselves insufficient, as Marx held (though they are understandable, and may energize people and make them angry against the system, and this anger may lead to significant forms of collective struggle). However, the struggle to attain morality, the struggle to make values possible, continually crashes against the fabric of society. It is this that makes struggles for gender equality, ‘race’ equality and so on so explosive. In capitalist society, these forms of equality (like all other forms of equality) are impossible. But the struggle for their attainment exposes their possibility, a possibility that arises only within a post-capitalist scenario.
On this analysis, collective quests for gender and ‘race’ equality are a threat to the constitution of capitalist society; they call forth forms of equality that can have no social validity, no existence, within the universe of capital – as all forms of equality are denied except for one. This is equality on the basis of exchange-value. On the basis of exchange-value we are all equal. There are a number of aspects to this.
First, our labours may be equal in terms of the value they create. However, as our labour-powers have different values, then 10 weeks of my labour may be equal to a single day of the labour of some highly paid soccer player. Equality here, then, operates on the basis of massive substantive inequality. Secondly, the value of our labour-powers may be equal; so one hour’s labour of two people with equal labour-powers (in terms of labour-power quality) creates the same value. In a paper of last year, I go on to show that although these are the only forms of equality socially validated within the social universe of capital, practically they are unattainable as other social drives break these forms of equalisation…. For example, the drive to enhance labour-power quality as between different capitals, national capitals and between individuals pursuing relative ‘self-investment’ in their own labour-powers would constantly disrupt any systematic attempt to create equality of labour-powers through education and training. Although forms of equality on the basis of exchange-value are theoretically possible, the first (equality of labour) is abominable as it is compatible with massive inequalities of income and wealth, whilst the second (equality of labour-powers) is practically hopeless. The outcome of all this is that struggles against inequalities in capitalist society are struggles for forms of equality that cannot exist within capitalism. Yet they nevertheless constitute struggles against the constitution of capitalist society, and also for equality than can attain social existence on the basis of the dissolution of the social universe of capital.
Rikowski explains, after Marx, how labour-power is transformed into labour in the labour process, and how, in this movement value, and then at a certain point surplus value, is generated. He illustrates that there are two aspects to labour: it is a process of producing use-values and also value (a valorization process). These are not two separate processes but both are expressions of the one and same set of acts within the labour process. Rikowski puts it thus:
If the product is useless then value is not realized at the point of sale. Labor power consists of those attributes of the person that are used in creating a use-value (the use-value aspect of labor power), but labor power also has a quantitative, value-aspect too. Through the activity of the worker (labor) in the labor process, some of our personal powers (labor power) also become expressed as value-generation. Thus: labor power is the unique, living commodity that is the foundation of value, the substance of the social universe of capital. We create the social universe of capital.
Rikowski goes on to argue that education and training play a key role in the social production of labour-power. There exists a social drive to reduce all education and training to labour-power production and, according to Rikowksi, this reflects the deepening capitalisation of the whole of social life. In contemporary capitalist society, education and training play an incredibly key role in the social production of labor power – which Rikowski reminds us is the single commodity on which the expansion of capital and the continuation of capitalist society depend. Thus, it behooves us mightily as critical educators to understand the processes by which education and training increasingly operate as vehicles of labour-power production, and — and this is crucial to remember — it is not labour but rather labour-power that generates value when it is expressed as labour in the capitalist labour process. Value is the substance of the social universe of capital. Education and training thus have a key role to play in the maintenance and expansion of the social universe of capital. As educators, as students, we are all involved in socially producing labour-power, although teachers have more social power in this regard than do students. If we are part of the endless social drive to enhance labour-power quality then we are at the same time participating in a process that necessarily creates an inequality of labour-power values, and works against what education in capitalist society should be about, which is labour-power equalisation. I am brought back to one of Marx’s reflections, “The realm of freedom begins where the realm of necessity is left behind,” and also, “limiting the length of the working day, is a crucial demand.”
The key here is to recognise the fundamental contradiction between the drive to enhance labour-power quality, and the real necessity of labour-power equalisation. And the latter is not possible within the social universe of capital. Rikowski is at the forefront of this idea, and here his contributions to critical pedagogy are of inestimable importance. Business and corporate leaders realise that education is all about the reproduction of labour-power for capital although, as Rikowski notes, they call it ‘human capital’, and this is a very scary term indeed. But it is accurate. In my writings I try to capture the alienation and fetishization and commodification of human life, of capitalism turning living labourers into abstract labourers. Here in the US, the process of educating students’ labour-power for capital is increasingly standardised — we make sure students can take standardised, multiple-choice exams that stifle their thinking and make them less able to develop the critical skills that can help them figure out that they are fodder for the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Rikowksi notes that “teachers and trainers have huge strategic importance in capitalist society: they are like ‘angels of the fuel dump’, or ‘guardians of the flame’, in that they have intimate day-to-day responsibility for generating the fuel (labour-power) that generates what Marx called the ‘living fire’ (labour)”. God forbid that students might question the representatives of capital! So the task becomes: Who can compete best in enhancing the quality of labour-power of students to further the efforts of neo-liberal globalisation? We, as teachers, labour for labour power production! We are learning to labour for labour-power enhancement, not labour-power equalisation.
So how can we disturb this process? How can we subvert, unsettle, resist, rupture and confound this process? Well, Rikowski argues that we can “work to enshrine alternative educational principles and practices that bring into question the constitution of society and hint at ways in which expenditure of labour-power does not take a value form.” We are constituted by labour and capital and this contradiction plays itself out within the deep recesses of our psychologies (as psycho-Marxism has shown us).
We are constituted by the concrete, qualitative, use-value aspect; and secondly by the quantitative, abstract value-aspect of labour and we are produced, necessarily as ’living contradictions’. We are, assuredly, propelled by the movement inherent in this living contradiction in the direction of transforming ourselves by changing society (by the coincidence of changing circumstances and self-change, as Marx would put this notion we call revolutionary praxis), and through this by struggling to build a social universe outside of capital’s value form. So we can begin this task when we acknowledge how we can’t have real equality through exchange-value, but only on the basis of the equalisation of labour-power, or the equality of valorization of labour-powers. And why? Rikowski hits the socialist nail into the capitalist coffin when he says:
This is because the inequalities of labour-power quality generated within the capitalist labour process require re-equalisation to the socially average level in order to attain the equalisation of labour-power values that is the foundation of social justice in capitalism. As individual capitals are responsible for generating these inequalities, then they are responsible for re-engineering labour-power equality. Thus, capitalist enterprises are responsible for providing compensatory education and training in order to equalise labour-power values. As this process has indeterminate effects regarding surplus-value creation, which is the basis of capitalist profit, it is unlikely that, in practice, representatives of capital (employers) would pick up the tab.
Now here we can see why Rikowski notes that “social justice on the basis of capital exists only in the form of a mode of social life denied” precisely because the struggle for labour-power is annulled by capital’s social drive to enhance labour-power. We need to focus not only on social relations within the classroom but to take into serious account the quality of social relations in all organisations seeking to transform capitalist society. Here, all of us — whether we are teachers in classrooms, or workers in factories, or working in retail at the local boutique — are encouraged to become critical revolutionary educators. So, along with Rikowski, Paula Allman, Dave Hill, and Mike Cole, and others, I would like to see educators put into practice the critique of capitalist production and this should include, as Rikowski emphasises, the production of teacher work and its relationship to social domination in capitalist societies. And, of course, needed are theorisations and strategies of how labour-power can be used by workers in the service of anti-capitalist activity. As Rikowski notes:
Labor power is the supreme value-creating power on which capital depends for its existence, and it is incorporated within labourers, who have the potential to withhold this wonderful social force (through strikes or leaving the employment of a capital) or worse, to use labour-power for anti-capitalist activity and ultimately for non-capitalist forms of production. Together, these features make labour-power capital’sweakest link. Capital depends on it, yet has the capacity to be used by its owners against capital and to open up productive forms which capital no longer dominates. Marx and Marxist analysis uncovers this with a great force and clarity as compared with any other critical social theory.
So, insofar as we are able to, as Rikowski puts it, “critique the ways in which human labour constitutes capitalist society (how we become dominated by our own creations) and the constitution of capitalist society in terms of its basic structuring features” we are building the foundation for a truly critical pedagogy. Here we can ask ourselves how we become constituted — I would even use the word “enfleshed” — by the following aspects of labour-power summarised by Rikowski, below:
- The value aspect of labour (power): the quantitative aspect
- The use-value aspect of labour (power): the qualitative aspect
- The exchange-value aspect of labour (power): the aspect that determines the equality of labours and labour-powers
- The subjective aspect of labour (power): the will determined aspect
- The collective aspect of labour (power): the cooperative aspect (involved in workers working together)
- The concrete aspect of labour (power): the particularities and peculiarities of labour and labour-power attributes involved in specific labour processes and in specific work roles
Secondly, and here I am following Rikowski’s typology of what a truly revolutionary critical pedagogy would look like, I would explore how inequalities are generated by capitalist society —racialised inequalities, patriarchal inequalities, inequalities based on differential treatments of various social groups. The third moment in Rikowski’s architectonic is his recommendation that we critique all aspects of capitalist life. Rikowski summarizes this as follows:
- It is based on the works of Marx and Marxism, first and foremost;
- The starting point is the critique of the basic structuring phenomena and processes of capitalist society – which involves a critique of the constitution of capitalist society;
- The second most significant level of critique is the host of social inequalities thrown up by the normal workings of capitalist society – and issues of social justice can be brought in here;
- The third level of critique brings in the rest of capitalist social life – but relates to the first and second levels as frequently as possible;
- Two keys fields of human activity in contemporary society stand in need of fierce critique: capitalist work and capitalist education and training (including the social production of labour power);
- Labour-power – as capital’s ‘weakest link’ – deserves special attention as it has strategic and political significance.
I would add another feature to the schema Rikowski has provided. For me, since the value form of labour (abstract labour) that has been transmogrified into the autonomous moment of dead labour, eating up everything that it is not, can be challenged by freely associated labour and concrete, human sensuousness we need to develop what I call a philosophy of revolutionary praxis. This involves envisioning a non-capitalist future that can be achieved by means of subjective self-movement through absolute negativity so that a new relation between theory and practice can connect us to the idea of freedom. As Peter Hudis argues, the abolition of private property does not necessarily lead to the abolition of capital so we need to push further, to examine the direct relation between the worker and production. Here, our sole emphasis should not be on the abolition of private property, which is the product of alienated labour; it must be on the abolition of alienated labour itself. As I have mentioned before, Marx gave us some clues on how to transcend alienation, ideas that he developed from Hegel’s concept of second or absolute negativity, or ‘the negation of the negation’. I’ve written about his, and it comes mainly from the work of the founder of Marxist humanism in the US, Raya Dunayevskaya. In addition to this, we need an approach to decolonising pedagogy, and its not just a question of the epistemicide — the epistemological violence visited upon pedagogies (including pedagogies of liberation) via Eurocentric teaching philosophies and practices — but a question of pedagogies driven by neo-liberalisation, involving themselves, both in tacit and manifest ways, in spreading market ideology. This is where I support President Hugo Chavez, and movements in Latin America that are anti-neo-liberalisation.
RK: Barack Obama’s election as US President has reintroduced the debates on race and whether class can be termed the primary category and fundamental basis of social structure. Obama in a recent interview said, “…everybody’s learned their lesson. And the answer is not heavy-handed regulations that crush the entrepreneurial spirit and risk-taking of American capitalism. That’s what’s made our economy great. But it is to restore a sense of balance”. Given such deep commitment to capitalism one cannot expect him to revert back on what neo-liberal assault has done, even though majority of African-Americans are poor and pauperised, and worst hit by recession. In such case, Obama would not have greater sympathies for his race. Private capital, which helped him amass the largest ever election fund, will remain his priority. How do you see this situation?
PM: Well, I am going to answer this using some comments I made in a recent article about the election that is in press here in the US. The recent presidential election was perhaps little more than a rehearsal for a return of the same, a pretext for the restatement of business as usual in a different voice, whose message is more about timbre and pitch than policy— a rewriting of the old (the Leibnizian “we live in the best of all possible worlds”) in the new subjunctive language not simply of hope and possibility (what if?) but of resounding and reverberating hope and possibility (‘what if’ meets ‘we shall’), delivered in the Horatio Alger-Joins-the-Orange-Revolution aerosol discourse of “Yes We Can!”. This is because the hope of which Obama speaks is impossible to achieve under capitalism. Even if Obama has the best intentions, the rules of the game prevent the kind of difference that will make a real difference. Everything that could conceivably bring about the kind of social transformation that will dramatically change for the better the fabric of everyday life in America is unmasked as an impossible contradiction if we place it in the context of the persistence of capitalism as the only alternative way to organise the globe for overcoming necessity. Of course, we won’t place it in such a totalising context (isn’t totalising one of the bete noires of the Marxists, according to post-structuralist pundits?), but will focus on the subjective nature of the trauma or on the cultural aspects of the global crisis in which we are living rather than analyse the structural of systemic roots of the crisis).
In this regard, the election could be likened to a media virus programming its own retransmission via a well-worn template that has no entrance for the critic and no exit for the cynic. And no substance whatsoever. Participant spectators trying to use their ballot for political change find themselves sucked right back into a social universe of diminishing expectations and endless spectacle that keeps them narcotically entrained in a strange loop of sound-byte aphorisms. It’s forcing them to chase their tails inside what resembles a fetishized moebius strip, and absents any counterpoints or counter-narratives, devoid, in other words, of contextual or relational thinking. Or following the hands of an Escher drawing where the sketch dissolves into the artist then dissolves back into the sketch, ad infinitum; illusion and reality appear an endless dance with little chance of breaking out into a new moral, political or economic logic through some form of metacommunication or metapraxis — after all, who is there to listen except the already insane?
The unwitting victims, the popular majorities, have once again fallen prey to a contagion of manipulation, of an endless circularity of mutual determinations that spreads like a bacilli in a fetid swamp disguised as a golden pond that sports at its centre a shining marble fountain spurting audacious hope like a geyser of yellow ink. Obama’s fountain of national renewal.
The mainstream media coverage of the election created a vortex of political indeterminacy, of radical contingency — a multi-temporal, non-synchronous dynamic internal to the mechanisms of the election coverage as such — that encouraged anti-dialectical analyses of the issues facing the American public, causing its coverage to slip and slide, and remain unfastened to any coherent historical narrative of social change, making contextual thinking impossible and blurring the distinction between illusion and reality, between the cadaver and the autopsy that follows. The historical and contextual rudderlessness of the media created a conceptual field in which real transformation cannot be conceptualised. Such is the nature of the corporate media.
The election was a media spectacle that served as little more than an allegorical background for the battle for the soul of America. The media used our ballots to reproduce at the level of action the symbolic violence they export daily at the level of ideas. The goal is to get a neo-liberal of the right or the left elected — somebody who will not challenge the presuppositions of the transnational capitalist class. In the interests of subverting the Bush regime, voting Democrats became organs of the body politic, subverting their own interests in the belief that their votes would matter, that they had the power to explode the limits or the self-contained subjectivity of our media-educated expectations and conditioned political agency.
The conservative recipe for economic well-being – tax cuts and low inflation through monetary policy controls and unfettered and unregulated markets cannot succeed under global neo-liberal capitalism. The overall savings rate of Americans (it’s been dropping since 1997) failed to increase with tax cuts. Supply-side economics pivots on a small number of Americans controlling a significantly large amount of the nation’s total income – 1% of Americans that the GOP’s tax policies have favoured — and this policy has clearly failed the poor. Deficit spending did grow the economy by 20 per cent during Bush’s tenure but between 2002 and 2006, it was the wealthiest 10 per cent of households that saw more than 95 per cent of the gains in income. Deregulation simply became a criminal enterprise of making more and more profits. But the real question is whether or not the system of capitalism itself is criminal. Without answering this fundamental question, we focus on the salaries, benefits and bonuses of the top executives that are getting taxpayer bailouts from Washington. We bristle at the executive largesse in terms of cash bonuses, stock options, and personal use of company jets (the average paid to each of the top executives of the 116 banks now receiving government financial aid was $2.6 million in salary bonuses and benefits) — the total amount would actually cover bailout costs for many of the banks (so far they have received 188 billion of our taxpayer dollars) that have accepted tax dollars to keep afloat. So, while we fume about Wells Fargo of San Francisco, which took $25 billion in taxpayer bailout money with one hand and gave its top executives up to $20,000 each to pay personal financial planners with another, we would do well to focus more on our complacency with respect to capitalism as the only system under which democracy can flourish (and that’s quite an assumption about the state of democracy in this country).
The richest 400 Americans own more than the bottom 150 million Americans combined; their combined net worth is $1.6 trillion. During the Bush years, the nation’s 15,000 richest families doubled their annual income, from $15 million to $30 million and corporate profits shot up by 68 per cent while workers’ wages have been steadily shrinking (and the workers are not the ones who are being bailed out by the government). That scenario isn’t about to change radically with the election of Obama, who might possess Jeremiah’s aliveness to spiritual vision (don’t his hands look light lighted candles when he speaks) but is unwilling to unmask and name the powers that be because, well, for one thing, he is that power.
Predictably, the Republican spin machine, FOX News, is trying to stave off a New Deal type of depression-recovery program discussed by Obama by claiming that most historians agree that Roosevelt and the New Deal actually prolonged the Great Depression. Of course, this revisionist reading of history sounds even silly to freshmen college students, but if it gets repeated often enough, it will be received by FOX TV’s hapless listeners as if it were regurgitated from the bowels of the gospel.
We haven’t seen the worst of the economic crisis. And while we might not see a return to the orphan trains of the 1920s, where hundreds of thousands of homeless and orphaned ‘street urchins’ were taken to small towns and farms across the US as part of a mass relocation movement of destitute children and unloaded at various train stations for inspection by couples who might want to adopt sturdy children to help them work the farms, we can be sure that children will be suffering through the current recession along with their parents.
The media — the instruments of the cultural commonsense of the social — are structural features of capitalist society and thus part of society’s social practices and as such must be linked to larger historical developments linked to wider social forces and relations. Seen in this light, it becomes clear that the media supports those institutions that undercuts the collective needs, rights, and causes of workers and sullies any fertile ground in which social struggles might take root that can challenge capital on behalf of labour and the global working-class. In other words, the corporate media normalise the social division of labour and the ruthless exploitative practices needed to keep this division in place. Different blocs of capital must expand in order for capitalism to survive, and this means extracting the most profit possible. This essentially determines what gets produced, how, and by whom. It accounts for why one in six children worldwide are child labourers, and why corn and sugar are now often produced in the so-called Third World not to feed the hungry but to provide biofuels for advanced capitalist countries. This is why education and healthcare systems in the US are in tatters.
As racism became the torch of hope for the electoral victory of the Republican Party, millions of Americans decided that the juggernaut of hate riding on a crest of bile was too much for the American public and a groundswell of support for Obama — largely made possible by the organising skills of the anti-war movement and the popular left — was just enough to change the tide of history. To what extent the left can keep the pressure on the Obama presidency to focus on the unemployed at least as much as on the beleaguered industries remains to be seen. And even if it managed to keep the pressure on, there is no guarantee their voices will be heard as Obama has shifted centre-right since his election victory and seems bent on getting US troops further bogged down in Afghanistan. Regular “America at War” features on media outlets are sure to be there as long as US capital seeks to impose its will on foreign markets and serve as the alpha male for the transnational capitalist class.
And what about race? Since people of color still lag well behind whites in almost every major social, economic and political indicators, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2008) asks whether Obama will contest the new system of racial practices – what Bonilla-Silva calls “the new racism” — that is co-structured by a new racial ideology called “color-blind racism”. In other words, is Obama a post-civil rights minority politician (i.e., an anti-minority minority Republican or post-racial Democrat) who is successful because he does not directly challenge the white power structure? Bonilla-Silva argues that social movement politics and not electoral politics is the vehicle for achieving racial justice. And he notes that Obama’s policies on healthcare, immigration, jobs, racism, the war in Iraq and the Palestinian question are not radical, that he has made a strategic move towards racelessness and that he has adopted a post-racial persona and political stance. Obama doesn’t like to talk about racism (and when he does he likes to remind people he is half white) and unlike black leaders unpopular with whites (such as Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, and Al Sharpton) even suggests that America is beyond race. Bonilla-Silva writes that Obama works as a “Magic Negro” figure:
Obama also became, as black commentator David Ehrenstein has argued, the “Magic Negro” — a term from film studies that refers to black characters in movies whose main purpose is to help whites deal with their issues. In this case, voting for Obama allowed many whites feel like they were cleansing their racial soul, repenting for their racial sins, and getting admission into racial heaven! Obama became whites’ exceptional black man — the model to follow if blacks want to achieve in Amerika!
For many non-whites, particularly for blacks, Obama became a symbol of their possibilities. According to Bonilla-Silva (2008),
He was indeed, as Obama said of himself, their Joshua – the leader they hoped would take them to the Promised Land of milk and honey. They read in between the lines (probably more than was/is there) and thought Obama had a strong stance on race matters. For the old generation desperate to see change before they die (Jackson crying, John Lewis, etc.), and for many post-Reagan generation blacks (will.i.am from The Black Eyes Peas) and minorities who have seen very little racial progress during their life, Obama became the new Messiah following on the footsteps they did not such much as Martin and Malcolm.
But as Bonilla-Silva remarks, Obama’s policies on race matters were not that much different from Hillary’s, he was the darling of the Democratic Leadership Council, his economic and healthcare programmes are modest, he wants to expand the military by 90,000, intends to redeploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, is a big supporter of free-market capitalism and his policies on Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and Palestine are no better than Hillary’s. But many Obama voters believed (and many continue to believe) that “these are tactical positions Obama needed in order to get elected” and many of his positions are temporary, and Obama will suddenly turn left when he takes office. Obama’s really a “stealth candidate” – a revolutionary about to announce a far shift to the left that will have both liberals and conservatives quaking in their boots. The fear that Bonilla-Silva (2008) raises — that “the voices of those who contend that race fractures America profoundly may be silenced” in Obamerica — are real, and that Obamerica may bring us closer to the racial structure of many Latin American countries:
We may become like Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Belize, or Puerto Rico — nation-states that claim to be comprised of “one people” but where various racial strata receive social goods in accordance to their proximity to “whiteness”. And like in Latin American countries, Obama’s nationalist stance (“There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America”) will help close the space to even talk about race. Hence, in Orwellian fashion, we may proclaim “We are all Americans!, but in Obamerica, some will still be “more American than others.
And while clearly racial justice has been retreating to its lowest point since the Kerner Commission Report announced 40 years ago that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal” the election of Obama is unlikely to signal a permanent reversal of this trend.
Can Obama take on the military establishment? The corporate structure? Sheldon Wolin notes that we live in an “inverted totalitarianism” in which the entertainment industry via spectacles and diversions is able to keep the citizenry politically passive, as long as there exists a reasonable standard of living. Even if there are more popular protests due to the economic crisis, the media will ignore them. In my view, we need more Battle of Seattle, in every city, simultaneously!
III
RK: In your work Capitalists and Conquerors, you argue that schools teach students skills that are required by capital and even their dreams are limited to the sphere of capital. The desire to transcend the rule of capital is suppressed through the mechanics of school. This also invokes the Althusserian idea of ideological state apparatuses. How does one counter this suppression?
PM: I have tried to give you the basics of this answer in my discussion of Glenn Rikowski’s path-breaking work on teaching for an anti-capitalist future. I have had trouble, myself, taking on the ideological apparatuses of the state, especially after a right-wing group in 2006 launched an attack on me and my fellow leftist professors at UCLA, placing me as the number one figure in their Dirty Thirty list, as the most dangerous professor at UCLA. Steve Best, Tony Nocella and I have just finished editing a book on academic repression. In the introduction we discuss right-wing pundits such as David Horowitz, who has penned an Academic Bill of Rights. The introduction to the book describes the Academic Bill of Rights as “a thinly veiled Trojan horse that threatens the core values and very life of academia. Horowitz’s clever tactic is to use liberal/Left discourse to advance an extreme rightwing agenda that strips professors – or any professor not a totally brainwashed product of American society and its capitalist values – of their right to publish, teach, and act as citizens as they wish. What the Academic Bill of Rights attempts to do is to give the already advantaged and overprivileged more power than the surplus stock it already holds. “Intellectual diversity” and such phrases are merely code words for empowering rightwing ideologies. It’s call for “balance” is really a ploy for imbalance, for a pre-’60s sterile groupthink, conformist environment dominated by conservative thought without any diversity among faculty, programs, courses, and intellectual life (if there would be one at all). Unable to think outside of the corporate box and utilitarian model of education, they have no idea what real education is, a mission that includes encountering and engaging differing viewpoints; students would be denied this opportunity. It is healthy and vital for conservative students to hear radical perspectives, as it is for progressive students to hear conservative perspectives”.
The truth of the matter is the stranglehold of corporate power on the universities is choking the life out of whatever remains of the university’s role as a vehicle for the advancement of public life. Some of us are directly involved in fighting for academic freedom, and resisting the capitalist and imperialist values that the universities are coming to enshrine through curricula, business partnerships, and the like. Our battle in the schools of education, housed in universities, is through the advancement of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy is under ideological assault, both here and elsewhere, such as Australia. Bill Ayers, the distinguished leftist at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who was a member of the Weather Underground in the 1960s, was demonised recently by the Republican Party during the Presidential election, since Ayers and Obama knew each other as fellow community activists in Chicago. So, the demonization of Ayers has also spread to a demonization of so-called “critical” educators in general, some of whom who are tarred with the same brush as being anti-American and pro-terrorist. These are tough times for the educational left. Very tough times.
RK: The resistance to this suppression becomes furthermore difficult when one finds, what you call “reproletarianisation” of teachers. Given this situation we encounter certain problems, as in the case of India. There are teachers who are employed till the age of “retirement” with different kinds of benefits and their unionisation is limited to demands for salary raise. On the other hand, there are teachers who are employed on contract with meagre salary (in many cases as low as $20) by government. In a sense while there is a ‘teaching aristocracy’ that does not consider itself as workers and on the other a pauperised teaching labour force, which is non-unionised. The role of the Left forces in these cases has been dismal. Where does resistance begin in such cases?
PM: Yes, the same is true here. Teaching assistants in universities in many cases do the bulk of the teaching yet they get little compensation and protection. Many students want a few waivers so they can go to school while they teach and not pay tuition. Budgets are currently being slashed, and tuition fees are rising dramatically. Historically, it has been a tough battle to get academic student-employee unions recognised. Universities, no longer protected from the market, as they once were through funding by the state, are relying more and more on corporate funding that invests in technology-based research, research that can make the corporations more effective and help to make them dominant in the neo-liberal capitalist economy. Professors – especially those in the hard sciences – put as much, if not more, effort in getting research funding and doing research than teaching, and of course the class sizes are ever-increasing and there is a decrease in the number of full-time, tenured professors teaching classes and there is the necessity for more cheap intellectual part-time labour in the form of teaching assistants. So strong union movements are needed to protect teaching assistants, since they face a difficult task. Clearly, the labour aristocracy needs to be challenged. There needs to be joint-efforts between tenured professors and teaching assistants, they have to form a united front and work together with the unions to take on the universities. This type of united front is needed, and it should have a common purpose of saving the university from becoming just another sub-sector of the economy. All of this revolves around developing an understanding of how social institutions need to reorganise themselves – in tandem with the reorganisation of society as a whole – to fight the capitalisation and commodification of subjectivity, to fight universities whose mission is to educate labour-power for capital, and such a valorization process can only lead to structured hierarchies of power and privilege that serve the few, and bring misery to the many.
RK: This crisis is augmented by the increasing significance of a non-political, anti-capital, anti-class gang of people (also called activists) who do not approach the problems under capitalism such as the issue of displacement of millions of Indians (caused by ‘developmental’ projects) as by-products of a system that needs to be overthrown to prevent such callous and insensitive treatment of the masses. The World Social Forums or the Narmada Bachao Andolan (movement against a big dam on river Narmada because it displaced millions) have been criticised on such lines. Where does one place the role of such an ‘opposition’?
PM: Well, clearly we need to insist on the priority of affiliation –political commitments based on the basis of moral and political judgement – rather than a politics of filiation, or ethnic belongingness. But this mandates that activists examine critically social relationships in their totality, that is, in the context of their relationship to the greatest totalising force history has ever known – capitalism.
The 1999 battle of Seattle summoned a collective “ya basta!” that saw the closure of a meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and since that time the WTO, World Bank and IMF have been forced to conduct their business behind police barricades. Initially, the WSF forum succeeded in creating an anti-hierarchical and non-vanguardist space for the grassroots left to give collective voice to a critique of global capitalism and its attendant abuses. But it soon became taken over by established political parties of a leftist bent, who promoted reformism and various forms of accommodation to capitalist accumulation and the law of value, and also gave way to the glamour politics of major celebrity speakers. The question that has been posed to the WSF by James Petras and others is: “To what extent does WSF dissent become a fashionable guerrilla apostasy and to what extent does its work actually threaten the interests of global capital? The fundraisers, after all, set the agenda. And many of the sponsors of the WSF are hardly radical institutions. What is heartening is the recent declaration of the Assembly of Social Movements at the recent WSF in Belem, Brazil, 2009. Here the social movements – which are in solidarity with the efforts by feminist, environmentalist and socialist movements – maintain promisingly that the current global crisis “is a direct consequence of the capitalist system and therefore cannot find a solution within the system”. They write: “All the measures that have been taken so far to overcome the crisis merely aim at socialising losses so as to ensure the survival of a system based on privatising strategic economic sectors, public services, natural and energy resources and on the commoditisation of life and the exploitation of labour and of nature as well as on the transfer of resources from the Periphery to the Centre and from workers to the capitalist class.” An important consensus has been reached – that a radical alternative is necessary that would do away with the capitalist system.
- Nationalising the banking sector without compensations and with full social monitoring;
- Reducing working time without any wage cut;
- Taking measures to ensure food and energy sovereignty;
- Stopping wars, withdraw occupation troops and dismantle military foreign bases;
- Acknowledging the peoples’ sovereignty and autonomy, ensuring their right to self-determination;
- Guaranteeing rights to land, territory, work, education and health for all;
- Democratise access to means of communication and knowledge.
- Here, we can appreciate the fact that forms of ownership that favour the social interest are supported and advanced: small family freehold, public, cooperative, communal and collective property.
But all of this is a cautionary tale: The mass movements and trade unions can always be coopted by centre-left regimes or even centre-right regimes. As critical educators, we must work tirelessly to broaden our political project to include the support of social movements seriously challenging the distribution of public wealth and the destruction of local habitat and economies by multinational corporations. As Petras argues, social movements must work towards developing national cadre structures so that they have a chance to take state power – without state power little can be done to seriously challenge the power of the transnational capitalist class. Needed more than ever, Petras argues, are concrete organisations of struggle rooted among radical youth and among ‘employed’ as well as ‘informal workers’ in a broad effort at socialist revival and renewal that will ensure socialist organisations make stronger organic links with everyday anti-capitalist struggles. Direct intervention of conscious socialist-political formations deeply inserted in everyday struggles capable of linking economic conditions to political action is, according to Petras, the only way forward. That is the point at which we must secure our opposition to the rule of capital.
RK: It is significant to talk of such categories of ’opposition’ because at a certain plane, their acts have furthered the idea of education as autonomous in itself. Hence, we find thousands of ‘alternative’ schooling systems, which rarely link the flaws and fallacies in education system to the rule of capital. The dialectics of labour and capital, or system and education machinery is missed out by such experiments and so is the simultaneity of reform and revolution. How do you see resistance to capitalism and its education system coming up?
PM: Yes, there is danger in presenting education as autonomous, as unconnected to the totality of capitalist social relations. Here in the US, we have charter schools, and alternative schools, but very few of them, to my knowledge, teach from an anti-capitalist perspective. Such schools assume, ideologically, left liberal (i.e., reformist) positions but at the level of practice they amount to a left neo-liberalism, since by not challenging the law of value in capitalist societies, they implicate themselves in the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor.
RK: Lastly, you argue that schools should become “sites for production of both critical knowledge and socio-political action”. How do you see this happening given the complex relationship of schools, system (run by private capital), and pauperising mass of people? What direction should the analysis of educational ills take?
PM: Well, I believe that my previous answers have mainly addressed your final question, and I can only add the following point – whatever strategies we adopt in our analysis of education, they need to have a transnational reach. Which is why it is important that we have conversations such as this, since we are in the process of charting out a transnational anti-capitalist agenda on the part of educational workers, global citizens who fight both locally and globally for bringing about a socialist future? Now the first step is to become aware of the perpetual pedagogies at work that normalise the rule of capital – the corporate media, the new computer and communication technologies, and all of the ideological state apparatuses that serve to legitimise capitalist social relations. We need to become critically literate about how all of these media function through multiple literacies, and how the new technologies work in the process of self and social formation. Once we know how they work in the process of ideological production, we can develop ways to interrupt their efforts and counter them. Our classrooms, community organisations, alternative media, and social movements can become sites for the creation of a counter-public sphere in which we can strengthen and coordinate our efforts to build national and transnational cadres – but this requires that we work to exercise state power responsibly and protagonistically by transforming the institutional structures of society and working to change the state from the bottom up in participatory, democratic and revolutionary ways.
Peter McLaren is a Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author and editor of 45 books and hundreds of scholarly articles. Professor McLaren’s writings have been translated into 20 languages. Four of his books have won the Critic’s Choice Award of the American Educational Studies Association. One of his books, Life in Schools, was chosen in 2004 as one of the 12 most significant education books in existence worldwide by an international panel of experts instituted by The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation. McLaren was the inaugural recipient of the Paulo Freire Social Justice Award presented by Chapman University, California. The charter for La Fundación McLaren de Pedagogía Critica was signed at the University of Tijuana in July, 2004. La Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated in Venezuela on September 15, 2006, as part of a joint effort between El Centro Internacional Miranda and La Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela. Peter McLaren left his native Canada in 1985 to work in the United States where he continues to be active in the struggle for socialism. A Marxist humanist, he lectures widely in Latin America, North America, Asia, and Europe. His most recent book (co-authored with Nathalia Jaramillo) is Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire (Rotterdam and Taiwan, Sense Publications). With Steve Best and Anthony Nocella, he has co-edited a forthcoming book, Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex (AK Press). In 2006, during the Bush administration, Professor McLaren made international headlines when he was targeted by a right-wing extremist organization in the United States and put at the top of the “Dirty Thirty” list of leftist professors at UCLA. The group offered to pay students a hundred dollars to secretly audiotape McLaren’s lectures and those of his fellow leftist professors. Professor McLaren’s work has been the subject of two recent books: Teaching Peter McLaren: Paths of Dissent , edited by Marc Pruyn and Luis M. Huerta-Charles (New York: Peter Lang Publications) [translated into Spanish as De la pedagogía crítica a la pedagogía de la revolución: Ensayos para comprender a Peter Mclaren. , Mexico City, Siglo Veintiuno Editores] and Peter McLaren, Education, and the Struggle for Liberation , edited by Mustafa Eryaman (New Jersey: Hampton Press).
Radical Notes 
The Evolution of Knowledge Production in Capitalist Society
Curry Malott
Epistemology, or the study of knowledge, is at the heart of all teaching, learning and knowing in general. When setting out to examine and understand the knowledge produced by any system, it is imperative that one focus on the most central and underlying assumptions informing the knowledge-production process. Because we are interested in the knowledge produced by both capitalism and neo-liberal capitalism, we will begin our investigation looking at its ideological structure, historically contextualised. We pay particular attention to what knowledge is deemed valid and which knowledges are deemed invalid (Kincheloe, 2005) within the social universe of capital as a central aspect of understanding the role power plays in the validation process.
Competing Conceptions of Social Class
What defines capitalism more than any other characteristic is that it is a class-based system. At its most basic level, social class can be understood as the hierarchical grouping of people based on similar economic and occupational characteristics giving way to the collective experience of social rank and caste, such as lower/working class and upper/ruling class, and the manifest relationships between and within such stratum. Associated with the notion of class, and especially with caste, is the idea that it is predetermined by government power or noble authority, who loosely determines, by birthright, what occupations are available to which groups.
Because occupation is not judicially determined by birthright in North America — the United States, Mexico, and Canada, among much of the world — the ontological perspective that differences in wealth and power exist not because of social class, but rather, are indicative of the division of labor that roughly represent the natural distribution of intelligence and drive, represents the dominant, hegemonised perspective, which tends to not be overtly stated in the knowledge production process, but rather, is implied. From this perspective, socio-economic difference becomes no more or less important to human diversity than eye color or body type, that is, one of many neutral differences that are entitled to universal respect and dignity. Class difference is therefore not something to be resisted, but rather, tolerated. Within this interpretative framework, through which praxical knowledge about being in the world is produced, the concept of social class, to reiterate, is rarely discussed or included. In other words, within the knowledge production process of the bosses/the ruling class, social class is constructed as non-existent.
As the vast majority of humanity, with varying levels of severity, are oppressed as wage workers by this hierarchal system of neo-liberal capitalism, it should be no surprise that there exists an ancient tradition of knowledge production from working-class/subjugated perspectives, which, in different ways, have argued that the unequal relationship between what we might call bosses and workers is not the natural outcome of genetically-determined endowments and deficiencies but is the result of a long legacy of abuse. We might begin naming this legacy as coercive, brutal, and manipulative manifesting itself in highly concentrated accumulations of wealth and power that are as nearly deterministic as birthright in reproducing class structure and social relations, more generally affirming the central role class plays in capitalist society. Within this paradigm, the concept of social class is most fundamentally represented in the relationship between the vast majority, divested from the means of production, therefore possessing only their labour to sell as a commodity, and the few who hold in their hands the productive apparatus, land, and resources, and the vast fortunes accumulated from purchasing the labor power of the landless multitudes at a price far below the value it generates. In short, this antagonistic relationship between social classes represents the heart of what capitalism is.
Drawing on the insights of Adam Smith, Noam Chomsky (2007), summarising what we can understand to be the ontological perspective of the profiteer or capitalist, notes that, “the ‘principal architects’ of state policy, ‘merchants and manufacturers,’ make sure that their own interests are ‘most particularly attended to,’ however ‘grievous’ the consequences for others” (pp. 41-42). Similarly, outlining the primary self-serving invention of the capitalist, the corporation, Joel Bakan (2004) observes that, “corporations have no capacity to value political systems, fascist or democratic, for reasons of principle or ideology. The only legitimate question for a corporation is whether a political system serves or impedes its self-interested purposes” (p. 88). Because safety and environmental regulations are a cost to production and thus encroach on margins, they are frequently violated as corporations sacrifice the public to satisfy their own self-interests.
Since The Great Depression of 1929 it has been increasingly difficult in North America to externalise these costs to those who rely on a wage to survive. For example, to appease an increasingly rebellious underclass the Bretton Woods system was established in 1944, which, among other things, limited the mobility of capital, and, as a result, weakened the deadly grip of capital. However, with the assistance of an intensified emphasis on the propaganda machine, including schools and the corporate media, that have been designed to manufacture the consent of the working and middle classes to support their own class-based oppression as normal and natural, Bretton Woods was dismantled in 1971, which gave way to an era of unrestricted capital movement, and, consequently, the massive redistribution of wealth upwards (Chomsky, 2008). This focus on the use of consent/the control of ideas/hegemony has resulted in the production of knowledge taking on a renewed importance within American and Canadian settler societies. The struggle over the purpose and goals of the education system has consequently become one of the primary battlegrounds where the working classes and the ruling class vie for political power to determine the course of history.
From this epistemological perspective, as long as social class exists, that is, as long as there are two antagonistically related groups, workers and bosses, rich and poor, or oppressed and oppressors, there will not be consensus on what explains the basic structures of society because what tends to be good for one group tends not to be beneficial for the other. For example, the idea that social class does not explain the inequality rampant in capitalist societies, but is the result of natural selection, is good for the beneficiaries of market mechanisms. At the same time, the notion that the violent class relation that can only ever offer cyclical crisis and perpetual war is at the core of capitalist society has provided much fuel against capitalism. In short, the class struggle that is indicative of capitalism itself is represented in the “fact” that higher wages are good for workers because they increase their standard of living, but hurt the bosses by encroaching on margins/profits.
From here a smart place of departure might be to observe the current post-Bretton Woods economic structure of North America. A look at the data indicates that in the last 10 years in the United States the wealth of the ruling class has exploded while the middle class has simultaneously experienced a steady period of decline as the offshoring trends of the 1980s and 1990s have dramatically effected not just blue-collar manufacturing jobs, but white-collar service sector employment as well. As a result, the ranks of the poor and the pissed off have continued to swell. No longer able to finance a middle-class lifestyle, consumer debt also skyrocketed during this period. Setting off a system-wide pandemic of foreclosures, the bosses assured the public that the economy was fine, largely ignoring the high cost the public was paying. According to Greider and Baker (2008):
Reflecting on this quote in a personal communiqué Joe Kincheloe observed that, “now that ‘creative destruction’ is reaching the corporate elite, they are not so sanguine about the situation,” which is to be expected because, from the boss’ perspective, “the pain of structural adjustment for the privileged is more distressing than it is for the poor.” It was only a matter of time before the mega-banks collapsed into their own self-made house of cards constructed of worthless defunct mortgages. The current crisis and the government’s attempts to “bail out” the capitalists with an unprecedented 700-billion dollar “bill”, which increased to nearly a trillion dollars before it passed both the Senate and the US House, has exposed the self-destructiveness embedded within the logic of capital.
The knowledge being produced about the bailout aired through the corporate media focuses on the ways the bailout will benefit “mainstreet”, that is, the workers of capital, which, in a way, has some element of truth to it because the financial capitalists cannot operate on their own. That is, they depend on other capitalists involved in industry, commercialisation, real estate, etc. to borrow money and invest in human labour as a commodity who actually do the work and produce the wealth that is then appropriated, reinvested, gained, lost, etc. It should, therefore, not be surprising that the majority of representatives of the House and US Senators, in making their case for the bill, stressed, over and over, the benefits that will accrue to the “small people” as justification for their “yea” rather than “nay” votes. But using that indirect “benefit” to obscure the basic antagonistic relationship between labour and capital, which, as long as it remains intact, the majority of humanity will suffer, can be viewed as nothing short than an aplogoy for the inevitable injustices of capitalism.
We might, therefore, say that the mere existence of capitalism, its ruling classes in particular, represents the constant risk of an uprising, and the more powerful the bosses, the greater the inequality between the oppressors and the oppressed, and therefore the greater the probability of an uprising or frontal assault designed to seize control of state and private power. The bosses tend to have this awareness, and it is for this ruling-class class-consciousness that the hammer is always in the background. However, the elite are more interested in avoiding disruption because that kind of instability is not good for business. The ruling class perceive those who rely on a wage to survive as a constant pontential threat because their existence as labour is structually, by definition, set against their own creative human impulse.
From this perspective, labour is always instinctively operating at some level of uprising in their struggle to relieve themselves from the chains that bind them. The objective of the capitalist is, therefore, to keep working class resistance at the lowest possible level through the combined use of force and consent, placing special emphasis, for obvious reasons, on consent, that is, the control of ideas. It has been argued by mainstream progressive sources that the slight hesitation to pass the recent trillion-dollar bailout “bill” represents a victory for democracy because of the public’s overwhelming disapproval and the swelling “crisis in confidence”.
This crisis in confidence does not merely refer to the reluctance to spend money, as the corporate media would have us believe, but runs to the very core of capitalism as a viable economic system. Former United States President George W. Bush alluded to this reading of the world in a special television appearance where he reassured his audience, the “small people”, that “democratic capitalism is the best system that ever existed”. Similarly, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino offered similar reassurance arguing that the United States is “the greatest capitalist country in the world” and that the public only needs to be willing to suffer for a short time so “we” can, once again, “enjoy prosperity”. Of course, the bosses would never offer workers a choice in the matter, so we will suffer unless we fight back and challenge policies that treat the well being of the public as incidental. That is, as long as the basic structures of power remain intact and wealth is flowing to the elite, the well being of the public is not a concern.
Let us now situate in an historical context the ways in which knowledge is and has been constructed to explain and account for these trends and inequalities. The remainder of this chapter examines different approaches to these class-based issues. We end our discussion with critical pedagogy, which has recently begun to emerge as a leading force in emancipatory educational practice.
***
It is worth restating, risking unnecessary repetition, that social class and related concepts, within western political discourse, have traditionally been articulated along an antagonistically related continuum. On one end, there is the idea that the existence of social class is evidence of the natural evolution of human society increasingly necessary as civilisation becomes more complex and advanced. On the other end of the spectrum, it tends to be argued that the existence of social class is the result of the appropriation of the naturally occurring division of labor, and therefore conceived as an unequal relationship that has been continuously and rather violently forced upon humanity. These two positions do not merely represent both sides, as it were, each possessing equal weight, and therefore embodying independent existences, unaware or unaffected by the other. What is demonstrated below is the intimate relationship between these competing perspectives on social class, one hegemonic, and therefore endowed with the power of the capitalist-state, (supporting the interests of the rich and the powerful), the other, counter-hegemonic, and as a result, historically marginalised by the dominant society, (representing the interests and concerns of the vast majority).
However, there has emerged within the critical conception of social class — and the social more generally — a tradition of thought that challenges the assumption of an external objective reality that the mind can neutrally comprehend with as much accuracy as a mirror reflects objects. As a result, such approaches refocus the debate from questions of accuracy to questions of certainty. While this shift may seem qualitatively insignificant, its ontological implications have immense pedagogical and curricular consequences. That is, if knowledge exists outside the realm of human intervention, then truth can be absolutely known and externally imposed. However, critical pedagogy argues that democracy cannot be pre-scripted because it is not a prescription. Democracy is a way of being in the world informed by common values such as social justice, equality, freedom, responsibility, and so on (Freire, 2005). While the practice of democracy undoubtedly requires complicated theoretical knowledge, it also requires that those insights be actively engaged with the concrete context, making it much more than a way of knowing — again, it is a way of being. These pedagogical issues are discussed in greater detail in the final sections of this paper.
In the process of outlining this dialectical discourse, we have demonstrated the complex and contradictory nature of the concrete context thereby underscoring both the conceptual limitations and benefits of the hegemonic/counter-hegemonic dichotomy outlined above. We begin investigating the assumptions underlying the production of knowledge under capitalism in Europe because it was the European model of class society that was reproduced around the world through the process of colonisation, which, in most regions, such as North America, continues to serve as the dominant paradigm.
Discourse Wars: Knowledge Production within Capitalism
Among the many scholars who have engaged in an in-depth study of the innermost workings of Europe’s model of class society, that is, capitalism, Karl Marx has proven to be the most influential, resilient, relevant, and responded to (both positively and negatively). One of the most widely read constructions of knowledge of all time, the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848/1978), by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, has touched, in one way or another, every major revolution around the world rendering its conceptualisation of social class particularly important for the study at hand.
By the end of the Manifesto’s first sentence — a relatively short sentence — Marx and Engels have clearly broken with the idealist romanticism of bourgeois scholarship by firmly situating their analysis of class within an historical dialectics of antagonistically competing interests noting that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (p. 473), and taken to its logical conclusion underscores the tenuousness of the present moment. The duo continue, linearly and temporally, from a European-centered perspective, naming what they understand to be the stages of conflicting interests that define human social development situating its beginning in ancient Rome and Greece, which would eventually give way to the modern, capitalist, bourgeois era.
Eurocentric, as suggested by the late Senegalese scholar and scientist, Cheikh Anta Diop, because there is evidence that suggests that capitalism is not, as Marx suggested, a relatively recent human construction because it existed in ancient Egypt. For example, Diop (1955/1974) argues that in rural and urban centers during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (2160-1788 B.C.) there existed “marginal capitalism” as evidenced by the labour force being “free” and “contractual” and the existence of “a business class who rented land in the countryside and hired hands to cultivate it” motivated by the sole purpose of generating “huge profits” (p. 210). In the cities, Egyptian capitalists engaged in what seems to be very modern business practices such as “interest-bearing loans, [and] renting or subletting personal property or real estate for the purpose of financial speculation” (Diop, 1955/1974, p. 210). While Diop (1955/1974) argues that it was the “inalienable liberty of the Egyptian citizen” (p. 210) that prevented the development of “strong capitalism” with more power over the populous than the state or nobility, the contradictions within Egypt’s hierarchical arrangements did lead to a series of unsuccessful internal revolutions.
Again, Diop’s analysis, examined next to Marx and Engels’ (1848/1978) history of human social development, underscores the latter’s European-centered perspective. That is, naming what they understand to be the stages of conflicting interests, beginning with ancient Rome, which transitioned into the Middle Ages, and finally giving way to the modern bourgeois era, Marx and Engels (1848/1978) comment: “freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed” (p. 473). However, while Marx and Engels’ timeline and family tree of humanity might be inaccurate, the conclusion that is drawn from the developmental concept remains highly relevant and instructive: the oppressors and the oppressed “stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (p.474).
This observation is particularly relevant, as capital’s current crisis, discussed above, has exposed, in stark relief, that the very existence of capitalism is an elite class war continuously waged in a never-ending quest to increase the bottom line, which can only come from more and more unpaid labour hours put to work grinding up more and more of the Earth’s vital ecosystems. As part of the process of abstracting and distorting these class relations, the stock market is incorrectly presented as the producer of value. Challenging the assumption that the “profits and losses that result from fluctuations in the price of” stocks represent “an index of genuine capital accumulation”, that is, “reproduction on an expanded scale”, Marx (1894/1991), in Volume Three of Capital argues that they are, rather, “by the nature of the case more and more the result of gambling, which now appears in place of labour as the original source of capital ownership, as well as taking the place of brute force” (p. 607-609) or the exertion of labour power”.
With the development of global capitalism Marx (1894/1991) saw financial capitalists or bankers taking on a more central role as “imaginary money wealth” created on the stock market “makes up a very considerable part” of the money economy. As a result, bankers have become “intermediaries between the private money capitalists on the one hand, and the state, local authorities and borrows engaged in the process of reproduction on the other” (p. 609). Providing an analysis of how this system, with its built-in upward pulling gravity, without strict regulations, inevitably leads to an imbalance of commodities to consumer ratio, and therefore to a disruption in the actualisation of value, Marx (1894/1991) observes that “if there is a disturbance in this expansion, or even in the normal exertion of the reproduction process, there is also a lack of credit” creating a crisis in the confidence of the actual value of credit, which is indicative of “the phase in the industrial cycle that follows the crash” (p. 614).
Marx (with Engels), despite his shortcomings, therefore seems to offer what has proven to be a valid observation, that is, human society tends not to stand still — it is always in a stage of development — and as long as the old oppressed class become the new oppressors, society will remain pregnant with a new social order. Returning to the Manifesto, in making their case that the relations of production under capitalism will eventually be burst asunder, Marx and Engels (1848/1978) document the process by which Europe’s (concentrating on France, England, and Germany) bourgeois capitalist class emerged “from the ruins of feudal society” (p. 474) playing “a most revolutionary part” (pp. 474-475) in that transformation.
The massive amounts of wealth extracted from the Americas by European powers led Marx and Engels (1848/1978) to the conclusion that “the discovery of America,” as they called it, was one of the primary driving forces behind “the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally” and therefore to the “revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development” (p. 474). The argument is that the small-scale feudal arrangements were not equipped to organise the large armies of labour necessary for transforming the massive amounts of raw materials imported from the Americas needed to meet the exploding European demand for commodities, which was fueled by the influx of unprecedented resources. What is more, unlike Europe’s nobility whose power stemmed from their possession of land, the emerging bourgeoisie, without land, gained their advantage through the accumulation of capital due to the mercantile role they played in the extraction of American and African wealth. Summarising the bourgeoisie’s transformation from the oppressed to the oppressors, Marx and Engels unveil their most feared and celebrated prediction — that the bourgeoisie, who are still in power, like all of the oppressors before them, too will fall. A Marxist analysis might, therefore, view each new crisis of capital, such as the most recent one, part of capitalism’s march toward its own inevitable demise. Consider Marx and Engels’ (1848/1978) description of the capitalist class:
While the broad strokes painted in the Manifesto of the Communist Party are useful for beginning to understand why knowledge produced by subjugated populations through the lens of Marx’s work continues to be both feared and exalted, we must focus more centrally on his more elaborated work on the division of labor as a transition into the perspectives of his pro-boss, non-solidarity critics, which continue to hold political sway in the contemporary context of global capitalism. In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx’s (1867/1967) discussion of primitive accumulation as part of the historical development of the capitalisation of humanity, which, as alluded to above, began in its “strong” form in England roughly a decade before Columbus set foot in present-day Haiti, is useful here in understanding Europe’s engagement in the Americas in particular, and global affairs in general. Because of the light it sheds on the discussion that follows, a sizable excerpt taken from Volume 1 of Capital (Marx, 1867/1967) is presented here:
From Marx’s work we can begin to read or construct the entire modern world as mediated and dictated by the westernised process of value production through the capital-labour class relation. In other words, we can understand the entire process, from the on-going need to primitively accumulate and expand, to the establishment of petrol-chemical industrialism, as a form of class struggle that began as a counter-hegemony, but has since developed into perhaps the most oppressive, destructive, and irresponsible hegemony in recorded history. Put another way, capitalism was initiated by Western Europe’s bourgeoisie against their feudal lords, some of the last remnants of Europe’s “Dark Ages”, but now rule with more barbaric force than ever before imagined. Ultimately, it has been the vast majority of humanity, disconnected from the soil and therefore from their indigenous culture, who have suffered from centuries of bourgeois pathology. In his examination of the historical development of class relations, Marx points to the division of labour as offering a place of origin.
Marx argues that during the early stages of human development the division of labour was a naturally occurring by-product of age- and sex-based physical difference, but also, and we would add, it is the result of the non-hierarchical creative diversity/multiple intelligences unique to human consciousness, as well as to the unpredictable nature of complex events, such as the establishment of purposeful economic systems. Within the division of labor, from this perspective, reside the most basic structural roots of organised society. Commenting on the division of labor Marx (1867/1987) notes:
The issue of one tribe subjugating another will be taken up later. For now I would like to focus on the context Marx situates this naturally occurring division of labor in. Marx (1867/1967) hones in on the place-specific nature of tribal communities commenting that “different communities find different means of production, and different means of subsistence in their natural environment” (p. 351). In other words, the development of technology is informed by the specific characteristics of physical place or geography such as climate, terrain, arable land, game, waterways, distance and accessibility to other human communities, and so on. As a result, human societies have developed vastly different technologies based on geography, which constitute the original source of commodities, that is, products produced in one context and consumed in another. For example, civilisations that emerged close to large bodies of water have tended to create ship-building technology, whereas those communities whose traditional lands are covered with ice, such as in the Arctic, have developed technology conducive to more efficiently navigating the snow such as sleds and snow shoes.
In the following analysis Marx begins to break, however slightly, from his Eurocentric, linear analysis, acknowledging the persistence of ancient communities in the “modern” era. As an example, Marx (1867/1967) points to “those small and extremely ancient Indian communities, some of which have continued down to this day, are based on possession in common of the land…and on an unalterable division of labor” (p. 357). However, “each individual artificer” operates independently “without recognising any authority over him” (Marx, 1867/1967, p. 358). Marx attributes this independence, in part, to the fact that within these arrangements products are produced for direct use by the community and therefore do not take the form of a commodity and therefore avoiding the value-generating process associated with it. As a result, the alienating division of labor engendered by the exchange of commodities is also avoided. Marx defines commodities as products consumed by others rather than those who produced them, and those who produce, under capital, are not independent craftsmen, but externally commanded.
Marx (1867/1967) quickly returns to Europe and goes on to argue that the guilds, who more or less laboured independently, resisted the bourgeoisie’s commodification of production and therefore “…repelled every encroachment by the capital of merchants, the only form of free capital with which they came into contact” (p. 358). Marx notes that the guild organisation, by institutionalising stages of production as specialised trades separate from one another such as the cattle-breeder, the tanner, and the shoemaker, for example, created the material conditions for manufacture, but “excluded division of labor in the workshop”, and as a result, “there was wanting the principal basis of manufacture, the separation of the labourer from his means of production, and the conversion of these means into capital” (p. 359). Marx stresses that the process of value production is unique to capitalism and is therefore a “special creation of the capitalist mode of production alone” (p. 359), and therefore not an original or natural aspect of the division of labor. Driving this point home, Marx critiques the “peculiar division” of manufacture, which “attacks the individual at the very roots of his life” giving way to “industrial pathology” (p. 363). Because of the forcefulness and accuracy of much of Marx’s work, many proponents of capitalism have been forced to attempt to refute the idea that capitalism is a form of pathology, and that the capitalist relations of production, the relationship between what we might crudely call bosses and workers, is negative or harmful for those who rely on a wage to survive, the vast majority of humanity. What follows is therefore a brief summary of some of Emile Durkheim’s pro-capitalist constructions that continue to dominate official knowledge production in the western world, which, with slight variations, are all capitalist.
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Widely influential French sociologist Emile Durkheim is considered to be one of the “fathers” and founders of sociology and anthropology. Through the late 1800s Durkheim challenged much of Marx’s analysis, setting out to demonstrate that the deep inequality between social classes that drew much attention from critics such as Marx — a central aspect of the Industrial Revolution that began in England — was a natural product of the development of human societies, and should therefore not be resisted, but encouraged through such sorting mechanisms as schools. Essentially, what Durkheim (1893/2000) argues is that humanity (those relegated to the status of worker) would be wise to divest itself of any illusions of maintaining an independent existence and rather “equip yourself to fulfill usefully a specific function” (p. 39) because society requires it, that is, to bend ourselves to fit within the system that exists, to submit ourselves to the labour it requires. What Durkheim suggests is that the bourgeoisie, rather than a ruling class that embodies its own negation, represents the end of history and therefore the manifestation of the final and most advanced stage of human social evolution.
However, Durkheim could not ignore the class antagonism highlighted above by Marx, due, in part, to the intensity of the class struggle of his time and the recent memory of the worker’s Paris Commune of 1871. Acknowledging the human need of not being made a slave or being externally controlled, while maintaining his belief that inequality serves a necessary function in advanced societies, Durkheim notes that “moral life, like that of body and mind, responds to different needs which may even be contradictory. Thus it is natural for it to be made up in part of opposing elements…” (p. 39). In effect, Durkheim tells us that “progress” has a price — a price that tends to cause distress within the individual — but that is the nature of the universe, and it is not wise to challenge laws of nature. Building the foundation for this “functionalist” approach to sociology in his dissertation Durkheim (1893/2000) theorises:
Again, Durkheim does not stop here in his analysis of objective reality as he reaches ever deeper into the grandiose, going on to argue that the division of labour does not just occur within the realm of economics, but can be identified within every aspect of life, and within all forms of life, rendering it a “biological phenomenon,” and therefore a law of nature. By claiming that capitalism happened “spontaneously” and “unthinkingly”, Durkheim effectively rewrites history erasing the long struggle against the commodification of humanity that was anything but spontaneous or without thought. Essentially, Durkheim takes Marx’s idea of the naturalness of the division of labor and divests it of its independent and communal nature, and replaces it with the notion that inequality and subservience to power are necessary manifestations of the advanced development of the division of labor.
This basic formula, with roots in Platonic epistemology that views intelligence as naturally and unevenly distributed, continues to exist in contemporary hegemonic discourses of the ruling elite — it is the presupposition informing the entire foundation of ruling class policy and practice. As a side note, the current crisis in confidence, discussed above, can, in part, be understood as stemming from the seeming incompetence and confusion coming from the political bosses in Washington and elsewhere. Not only does Durkheim support this idea of a naturally-occurring hierarchical conception of class within societies that undergoes intensified scrutiny during times of crisis, but he ranks civilisations/nations on a similar scale. Essentially, Durkheim argues that there is a tendency among societies that demonstrates that as they grow larger, the division of labor grows more specialised and entrenched, and as a result, they become more advanced. However, confronted with the existence of larger non-white nations, Durkheim argues that there are exceptions to this rule, which seems to stem from his belief in racial hierarchy. Consider:
Durkheim’s implied white supremacy was not his own invention, nor was the idea of a natural hierarchy among Europeans represented within the division of labor new to him either. However, it is beyond the scope of this essay to trace the origins of those ideas. What follows, rather, is an analysis of how hegemonic conceptions of the division of labor have influenced policy in the United States situated in a more contemporary context from Lippmann to Friedman. Beginning with Lippmann we investigate how the idea of a natural hierarchy represented in the existence of rank-able social classes informed his ideas and practice concerning both domestic and foreign affairs.
Propaganda and Capitalism in the United States
Walter Lippmann was a highly influential architect of this discursive model contributing significantly to the implementation of its practice, a point Noam Chomsky (1999) has consistently given much attention to. For more than 50 years Lippmann was perhaps the most respected political journalist in the United States “winning the attention of national political leaders from the era of Woodrow Wilson through that of Lyndon B. Johnson” (Wilentz, 2008, p. vii). However, within the western tradition of hegemonic philosophy and practice, Lippmann’s ideas tended to fall on the liberal end of this distorted continuum. That is, while he believed it was the paternalistic responsibility of democratic government, comprised of those endowed with a naturally superior intelligence, to mould “the will of the people”, it must be for the common good and carried out without the conscious manipulation of propaganda. Set against what he believed to be the crude tactics of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Lippmann was concerned with purifying “the rivers of opinion that fed public opinion” (Steel, 2008, p. xv).
Like Durkheim before him, Lippmann too, discounted the ideals of democracy (such as the notion that the will of the people does not need to be externally commanded) as an “illusion” referring to it in Public Opinion(1922) as “the original dogma of democracy”. As we will see, Lippmann constructed a theory of humanity, assumed to represent the objective reality, as being too ignorant and steeped in prejudice and bias to be able to achieve the necessary competence to know what is best for themselves rendering the theoretical idea of democracy a fantastic vision, but not conducive to the imperfect reality of human depravity. Lippmann biographer Ronald Steel (2008), in his foreword to the recently re-issued Liberty and the News (1920/2008), reasons that:
That “qualification” was his assertion that democracy itself is an unachievable ideal. Contributing to his belief in the inferior intelligence of the general public was his engagement with the emerging field of psychology that reinforced his beliefs about the nature of human perception rendering most people unfit to participate in the democratic process. For example, in The Phantom Public (1927) Lippmann argues that “man’s reflexes are, as the psychologists say, conditioned. And, therefore, he responds quite readily to a glass egg, a decoy duck, a stuffed shirt, or a political platform” (p. 30). Lippmann was clearly informed by the idea that the public is limited to perceiving the world only as it has been trained to. As a result, there tends to be a great gap between what is believed about the world and the actual world, or, objective reality.
Highlighting the persistence of this paternalistic attitude, the US House of Representatives recently discounted the people of the United States’ overwhelming objection of the trillion-dollar bailout bill, arguing that the public is unable to comprehend the severity of the problem, and thus only see clear skies blind to the approaching storm. According to Lippmann (1927), not only is the public inherently limited in its sense of perception, but in its desire to know commenting that “the citizen gives but a little of his time to public affairs, has but a casual interest in facts and but a poor appetite for theory” (p. 24-25).
Summarising his position Lippmann (1927) concludes that it is false to “…assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress toward such an ideal. I think it is a false ideal. I do not mean an undesirable ideal. I mean an unattainable ideal…” (pp. 38-39). Lippmann therefore viewed education no more suitable to achieve democratic ideals than any other false sense of hope. As it turns out then, the United States, which has long presented itself as the world’s leading proponent of democracy, has a history of being influenced by thinkers who believe in hierarchy and supremacy and therefore view the theoretical context of democracy as not representative of the concrete context of human nature, and therefore an unwise goal to pursue.
Of course, men like Lippmann, armed with their superior capacities, do not suffer from the afflictions of inadequacy. From this perspective, the division of labour is largely based on the naturally occurring unequal capacities of men rendering some more fit to lead and design the social structure, while the most useful function for the vast majority reside in their physical ability to follow direction and labour — as passive spectators rather than active participants. The responsibility of those most fit to lead, the responsible or capable men, is therefore to regiment the public mind as an army regiments its troops. This is the boss’s moral and paternalistic “commitment”, as Lippmann (1943) referred to it. Because Lippmann’s conception of class was based on the assumption of a natural hierarchy, he was logically able to claim a moral relativism as well, which stands in stark contrast to Marx’s privileging of democratic relations over the unjust relationship between labour and capital, that is, between the oppressed and their oppressors. In making this case — a case ultimately against democracy — Lippmann (1927) proclaims, “It requires intense partisanship and much self-deception to argue that some sort of peculiar righteousness adheres to…the employers’ against the wage-earners’, the creditors’ against the debtors’, or the other way around” (p. 34).
The peculiar nature of Lippmann’s political relativism is further brought to the fore in his discourse on US foreign policy where he draws on the notion of “justice” as it pertains to the use of force. Lippmann’s analysis in U.S. Foreign Policy (1943), seems, in many ways, to be a direct response to the arguments presented in the highly publicised War is a Racket (1935/2003) by anti-war activist, World War I veteran, and Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler. Summarising his position on war Butler (1935/2003) comments:
Reflecting on the United States’ involvement in the First World War, Butler (1935/2003) notes that “we forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot Washington’s warning about ‘entangling alliances’” (p. 26). In U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, published eight years after War is a Racket, Lippmann (1943) invests a significant amount of time making an argument against the pacifism alluded to in War is a Racket, without, however, referring directly to Butler or his work. Like Butler, Lippmann too draws on the legacy of General George Washington, but draws almost opposite conclusions. Consistent with his usual style, Lippmann (1943) paints a picture of the benevolent leader whose responsibility it is to protect the national interest — the interests of the rich — which he must have the military capacity to do. Otherwise, through his vulnerability, he is inviting his enemy’s provocation, and therefore irresponsibly putting those who rely on his paternalistic protection at unnecessary risk.
Washington did not say that the nation should or could renounce war, and seek only peace. For he knew that the national “interest, guided by justice” might bring the Republic into conflict with other nations. Since he knew that the conflict might be irreconcilable by negotiation and compromise, his primary concern was to make sure that the national interest was wisely and adequately supported with armaments, suitable frontiers, and the appropriate alliances. (Lippmann, 1943, p. 51)
Lippmann’s reasoning here is simple enough: an empire, such as the United States, will not survive without room to grow and the muscle needed to protect its “interests”, that is, the interests of the rich or responsible men which include the subjugation of their own population during crises of confidence and the extraction and concentration of wealth. The essence of his argumentation lies in the same age-old paternalistic guardianship and moral relativism that allows questions of justice to be freed from issues of domination and subjugation. In making his argument Lippmann cites the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 as evidence of the United States’ “commitment” to extend its “protection…to the whole of the Western hemisphere” and that “at the risk of war, the United States would thereafter resist the creation of new European empires in this hemisphere” (Lippmann, 1943, p. 16). Monroe’s doctrine has come to be interpreted as “professing a unilateral US ‘right’ to circumscribe the sovereignty of all other nations in the hemisphere” (Churchill, 2002, p. 335) influencing its aggressive dealings with Indigenous sovereigns within its boundaries and those within its hemisphere such as Cuba and Jamaica and all other Latin American and Caribbean nations (Malott, 2008, 2007; Cole-Malott & Malott, 2008).
The context Lippmann situates US foreign policy in provides a useful lens for understanding the nation’s current policies, such as those concerning not only Cuba, but globally. After all, it is the responsibility of the more capable men to make decisions for less capable men, and any illusions concerning democratic principles only restricts the natural development of the division of labor worldwide. As we will see below, Milton Friedman (1962/2002) picks up on this line of reasoning arguing that restrictions on the extraction and accumulation of wealth and the further entrenchment of class antagonisms only threatens the freedom of “progress”, that is, capitalism, and of men and women pursuing it.
Milton Friedman, pro-capital, economist extraordinaire, received worldwide recognition in 1976 winning the Nobel memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and has been touted as the world’s most influential economist of the twentieth century. Friedman has drawn the attention of the likes of internationally-renowned political analyst and activist Noam Chomsky (1999) who referred to him as a “neoliberal guru” while vociferously critiquing his (1962/2002) Capitalism and Freedom for hegemonically equating “profit-making” with being “the essence of democracy” and that “any government that pursues antimarket policies is being anti-democratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy” (p. 9).
Friedman’s supposition that the surest way to freedom is through capitalism is informed by the ancient hierarchy of intelligence paradigm that views economic competition the playing field most conducive to fostering the environment that will encourage and enable the superior individuals to rise to the top and assume their place as leaders and decision makers, that is, capitalists. Attempts to legislate against exploitation and abuse to ensure a functioning democracy, from this approach to knowledge production, is viewed as an attack on freedom because it prevents the naturally endowed masters from assuming their biologically determined place within the hierarchy. This construction is an unquestionable aspect of objective reality. Informed by this logic, the primary responsibility of government is therefore to “preserve the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and keeping markets free” (Friedman, 1955, p. 1). Connecting Friedman’s philosophy to practice Chomsky (1999) observes:
In order for government, and society more generally, to fulfil their scripted functions, reasons Friedman (1955), they require social stability, which is not possible without “widespread acceptance of some common set of values” and “a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge” (p. 2). Friedman (1955) reasons that the government should subsidise these basic levels of education because it “adds to the economic value of the student” (p. 4) and capitalists should invest in their labour just as they invest in machinery. The public is therefore viewed as a resource to be manipulated by the natural leaders for the common good. Making this point, Friedman (1955) argues that education “is a form of investment in human capital precisely analogous to investment in machinery, buildings, or other forms of non-human capital” and can be justified as a necessary expenditure because “its function is to raise the economic productivity of the human being” (p. 13). For Friedman (1955) then, knowledge production as an actively engaged endeavour is reserved for the elite, rendering the vast majority subject to the necessary “indoctrination” needed to ensure the widespread acceptance of “common social values required for a stable society” even if it means “inhibiting freedom of thought and belief” (p. 7).
As one of the world’s leading theoreticians of free market capitalism, it should not be surprising that Friedman (1955) was a strong supporter of the privatisation of, and thus the corporate control over, public education, masking it with a discourse of choice. In more recent times, he acknowledged that the testing-based No Child Left Behind Act touted as the surest path to increasing achievement was really designed to lend weight to the choice and voucher movement by setting schools up to fail and then handing them over to private managing firms such as Edison Schools (Kohn, 2004). Critical educator Alfie Kohn (2004) has commented that “you don’t have to be a conspiracy nut to understand the real purpose of NCLB” (p. 84). That is, NCLB is nothing more than a “backdoor maneuver” (Kohn, 2004, p. 84) constructed around conceptions of choice allowing private for-profit capitalists to take over public education. Friedman’s theory paved the theoretical pathway for these neoliberal tendencies of the public realm being handed over to corporations to be realised.
Friedman’s theory is based on the assumption that the competition for education dollars would push, out of the necessity to survive, education investors to offer superior products to attract customers. Schools that offered a sub-standard product would not be profitable, and would therefore be forced to either improve or close. Again, The No Child Left Behind Act of George W. Bush has served as a standards-based approach to usher in Friedman’s desire to privatise public education, which has had disastrous results on the knowledge production process. As a result, a major blow was leveled against the practice of education as an active engagement designed to understand the world and to transform it, taking aim specifically at the labour/capital relationship and its manifest hegemonies such as white supremacy and patriarchy.
These developments, however, are well documented. For the purposes of this discussion we will turn our attention to the larger Eurocentric vision of Friedman’s discourse, which is equally relevant as we approach a potentially new era in knowledge production in North America. That is, the potential Democratic presidency of Barack Obama, while pro-capitalist in principle, on their homepage, claim to “believe” that “teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests” (Obama Biden). The manifestation of this desire would provide critical pedagogues much needed breathing room to engage in counter-hegemonic knowledge production and critical praxis after this long period of Friedman-inspired privatization.
Friedman leaves little room for misinterpretation regarding his conceptualisation of democracy and social class, which, we will see, is, in many ways, almost the exact opposite of Marxism, underscoring, in a sense, a testament to Marx’s continued relevance in terms of directly and indirectly informing popular democratic movements challenging basic structures of power and therefore demanding a response by the architects of contemporary US public hegemonic discourse and policy. Within his paradigm Friedman (1962/2002) situates capitalism as the central driving force behind human evolution and therefore responsible for the “great advances of civilization” such as Columbus “seeking a new route to China” (p. 3), which consequently led to the emergence of vast fortunes generated by Europe’s colonialist empire building, slavery, genocide/depopulation and repopulation, and on a scale so massive, so horrendous and so utterly barbaric as to render comprehending its manifestation as a criminal act carried out by real living, breathing, feeling people almost unimaginable (Malott, 2008). Friedman, therefore, does not seem too different from his predecessors. That is, describing Columbus coming to the America’s as one of the great advances in civilisation can only be understood as callous and thoroughly Eurocentric.
But again, Friedman draws on the example of Columbus for the “advances” that have resulted from the “freedom” to pursue private “economic interests,” and therefore as evidence to support capitalism. Friedman (1962/2002) goes so far as to argue that free market “capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom” (p. 10). Friedman’s thesis can be understood as a direct response to the popular support for nationalised economies designed to promote an equal distribution of the wealth generated by the productive apparatus arguing that “collectivist economic planning has…interfered with individual freedom” (p. 11). Individual freedom, for Friedman, stems from unregulated market mechanisms “stabilised” by a limited government whose function is to “protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, and to foster competitive markets” (p. 2). Friedman points to the Soviet Union as an example of what he argues is the coercive tendency of government intervention in economic affairs. It is not surprising that Friedman does not mention the infinitely more democratic and egalitarian nature of Cuba’s centrally-planned economy compared to the US-supported free-market systems in the Caribbean and Latin America (Malott, 2007).
The “law and order” referred to by Friedman can best be understood as the way in which “the descendants of European colonizers shaped…rules to seize title to indigenous lands” (Robertson, 2005, p. ix) and to “enforce” these “private contracts”. Similarly, the Monroe Doctrine, touted by Lippmann (1927) as bound by “law” and “custom,” can be understood as extending the United States’ “sphere of influence” to the entire western hemisphere. That is, to ensure the resources and productive capacities of not only this region, but much of the world, would be controlled by US interests. These self-endorsed “commitments” of the United States have been upheld with deadly force explaining the US’s simultaneously open and hidden war against the Cuban Revolution and Castro’s trouble-making in the hemisphere (Chomsky, 1999; Malott, 2007). While the hegemony of US power has seemed all but total, it has not been without critique and resistance from not only Cuba and Latin America, but within the US as well. At the heart of this counter-hegemony has been the ongoing development of critical pedagogies, one of the primary philosophical influences of which can be traced to both Southern and Northern Native America.
Critical Pedagogy and Indigenity: Democratic Praxis against Social Class
Although he is certainly not the first critical pedagogue, the late Brazilian radical educator, Paulo Freire, is, however, the practitioner credited with the founding of what we have come to know in North America ascritical pedagogy with his first book being published in Brazil in 1967. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, initially published in the United States in 1970, is arguably the seed from which critical pedagogy in education in North America has sprouted. Freire and other critical theory-trained Latin American, critical pedagogues were highly influenced by liberation theologists such as Leonardo Boff (1971/1978) and Clodovis Boff (1987) of Brazil, Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez (1973/1988), and world-renowned Archbishop Oscar Romero (1988/2005) of El Salvador, who was assassinated in 1987 after becoming “known across the world as a fearless defender of the poor and suffering” earning him “the hatred and calumny of powerful persons in his own country” (Brockman, 1988/2005, p. xv). What is common among these leaders is that they all practised (practice) and developed their theologies with the poorest and most oppressed sectors of their societies, who, wherever indigenous peoples are found, tend to be indigenous peoples. Within these theologies of liberation we can therefore find the democratic impulse that can be treated, risking romanticisation, as a common characteristic among a diverse range of traditional indigenous communities.
Critical pedagogy has always been concerned with challenging the discourse of hierarchy that legitimises oppression and human suffering as indicative of the natural order of the universe. Rather than viewing intelligence as unequally distributed and therefore the practice of democracy extremely limited, critical pedagogy is based on an armed love and radical faith in people’s ability to tend to their own economic and political interests in the spirit of peace and mutuality. In a recent series of interviews with David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky (2007), describes the characteristics of what he understands to be the praxis of democracy, that is, widespread political participation.
This unyielding democratic impulse of western-trained, North American critical pedagogy can be largely attributed to the generous philosophical gifts of not only Native South Americans but Native North Americans such as the Haudenosaunee. According to Donald A. Grinde (1992) in ‘Iroquois Political Theory and the Roots of American Democracy’, many of the “founding fathers” of the U.S., Benjamin Franklin most notably, rejected the anti-democratic European model drawing instead on the brilliance of the Iroquois system of shared governance designed to ensure democracy and peace by putting power and decision-making in the intelligent hands of the people united in a confederation of nations and not in the divine right or assumed superiority of a ruler. Grinde and others in Exiled in the Land of the Free (Lyons & Mohawk, 1992) document, in great detail, the generosity of the Iroquois leaders in assisting Euro-Americans, before, during and after the American Revolution, in creating a unified Nation composed of the original 13 colonies as the foundation for long-term peace, freedom, liberty and democracy in North America. Putting the American Revolutionary war in a context foreign to traditional social studies instruction, Grinde (1992) notes that “the first democratic revolution sprang from American unrest because the colonists had partially assimilated the concepts of unity, federalism, and natural rights that existed in American Indian governments” (p. 231). It is abundantly clear that the gift of democracy received by the United States government by the Haudenosaunee has all been but subverted. For examples of the democratic tradition in contemporary times, outside of Native communities themselves, we have to turn our attention to the highly marginalised critical tradition.
However, we might say that this democratic tradition, commonly associated with European critical theory (i.e. Marxism), is an appropriation because the Native American source of these generous gifts, in the contemporary context, tends not to be cited. For those already engaged in the life-long pursuit of knowledge, this is an easily amendable flaw — requiring of such western-trained critical theorists/educators an active epistemological and material engagement with Native Studies and Indigenous communities the world over (Ewen, 1994; Kincheloe, 2008). We might say that the critical theoretical tradition, rooted in indigenous conceptions of freedom and liberty, represents a rich history of opposition to anti-democratic, authoritarian forms of institutionalised power — private (corporate), federal (state), and religious (Church/ clergy) — for it is this unjust power that poses the greatest barrier to peace. The example of the Haudenosaunee is relatively indicative of this tradition, which stands in stark contrast to the anti-democratic model perpetuated by Durkhiem, Lippmann, Friedman, and the like.
Questions of Certainty, Issues of Pedagogy
Questions of absolutism and certainty also become epistemologically central in the realm of pedagogy and the theory of our educational practice. Postmodern analyses challenge us to question the deterministic absolutism characteristic of enlightenment science. However, it would be foolish to take these critiques as an excuse not to consider what seem to be the more useful conclusions of modernist social science in regards to the role power plays in the legitimation process. For example, Marxists and other Enlightenment science radicals have gone to great lengths to quantify and reduce social trends concluding that the doctrinal system of the elite consistently portrays a distorted imagine of reality as neutral and therefore just how it is. This has been accomplished in the contemporary era through the establishment of a ruling class-controlled propaganda machine, employing schools, the government, and the mass media, which serves the function of maintaining social control. Some scientists argue that this control must be established, by either force or consent, whenever people are oppressed, because the species has a predetermined propensity for freedom and democracy, which is therefore built into the genetic design as an endowment.
Sceptical of any absolutisms regarding the highly complex and little known phenomena of consciousness and free will, that is, the human condition, we might argue that it only appears that humans are naturally democratic because the values of democracy have long been accepted and internalised by the vast majority of humanity rendering it easy to confuse that which has been socially constructed for a biologically determined characteristic. Rather than attempting to make a deterministic case for the human condition, as either democratic or competitive, we might argue that behaviourism has demonstrated that humans’ socially constructed schema are vulnerable to external manipulation suggesting more of a blank slate orenvironmental theory. Instead of putting this knowledge to work in the service of domination as the behaviourist tradition has done, we evoke it here to raise caution against anti-democratic practice.
However, we take issue with the radical or progressive scientific tendency to treat either of these analyses asmore or less accurate representations of objective reality even when they are grounded in the facts and not based on a desire to oppress and dominate. Following the postmodern insights of critical constructivism we therefore challenge the assertion that there is an objective reality that exists independent of the senses because it is the schemas of the mind that constructs ideas, explanations, and guides the practice of choice. Pedagogy based on the presupposition of an external objective reality can too easily lead to a form of anti-democratic critical banking and therefore not inclusive of the multitude of subjugated knowledges based on the multiple positionalities of oppression. We argue, on the other hand, that students should be actively engaged in the process of discovery or knowledge production based on a dialectical relationship between their own experiences and the theory of the social that suggests that there exists a macro-structural hegemonic power base that represents the common class enemy of the vast majority, despite the vast epistemological diversity found within human culture and individuality.
Again, it is not our aim to challenge critical descriptions of capitalism, especially those coming from the Marxist tradition, but to reframe them not as objective reality but as social constructions that, for now, do seem to best represent the phenomena in question (Kincheloe, 2005), that is, neol-iberal capitalism. In so doing, we invite learners to become actively engaged in the discovery process, or the process of naming and renaming the concrete context through the production of knowledge. Ultimately, the epistemological goal of critical pedagogy is not only to construct accurate and useful knowledge about the concrete context and the self, but to construct knowledge about how to transform the self as part of the process of transforming the world. For Marxists this means challenging and dismantling the labour/capital relationship and creating new relationships between people based on an inherently different set of values and ideals that challenge the hierarchies of antiquity that continue to dominate. We might understand this critical approach to knowledge production as part of the democratic process of becoming.
Conclusion
Reflecting on the current crisis of capitalism, working people, as always, will bear the burden because the bosses will not pay the costs if they can defer it to “the simple people”, as US Congressmen and women so often paternaliistically refer to the American people as. So they pay. But sometimes it takes a trillion-dollar reward for systemic irresponsible deception — the loving touch capitalism has always afforded “the bewildered herd” — to waken the sleeping giant of those who rely on a wage to survive. The crisis in confidence is the sleeping giant waking up, which goes much deeper than the reluctance to spend/consume. That is, the questoining goes to the heart of the modern world — the process of value production and its dehumanised underlying driving force, which is the quest for profit, whatever the consequence. While thesleeping giant metaphor can be useful and powerful, however, the risk is that it is a form of reductionism. That is, reducing the infinitely vast diversity of consciousness to a single entity flattens out the richness of all the contributing parts. We therefore must be careful not to confuse the individual parts for the whole (Kincheloe, 2005). To illustrate this point we might say that while the left pinky toe seems to effectively stimulate the epistemological curiosity of many people, it alone cannot account for the complexity of the entire giant.
As critical pedagogues it is within these instances of overt crisis that is our time to shine and do what we do: teach and engage with democratic principles, that is, help that big old giant stand up, become self-actualised, reach its full non-deterministic potential, and mature gracefully. Pedagogy is always critical at this juncture because the dominant paradigm does not recognise that we are all unique free wills and not things to be directed because it can’t. If the system did, it would not be what it is. It would be something different, and that is what we want. What will life after capital be like? Who knows? Maybe we’ll decide to call it Fun Style. Who is against fun? To be successful we must continue to rigorously strive to name the world, as it currently exists. We might call this the struggle over the meaning of our language, and thus, the meaning of the world and ourselves.
For example, despite the central role social class plays in determining the conditions of human life in capitalist society, it is a concept that receives very little attention in corporate media outlets. On rare occasion when it is introduced, it tends to be treated as the objective state of falling within a particular income bracket and is therefore just one of the many ways people are diverse, no more or less special than being male or female, or short or tall, for example. What is implied is that inequality is the natural state of humanity, and that any centrally-planned attempts to democratise the distribution of wealth is therefore unnatural because it limits the individual’s freedom to create his or her own economic destiny, allowing the cream to rise to the top, as it were. The entire history of coercion, propaganda, genocide, and conquest that paved, and continues to pave, the way for class society to exist, and the on-going resistance against it, tends to be left out of these discussions, almost without exception. Making a similar observation Chomsky (1993) plainly states that “in the United States you’re not allowed to talk about class differences” unless you belong to one of two groups, “the business community, which is rabidly class-conscious” and “high planning sectors of the government” (p. 67).
It is therefore not saying too much that the class-perspective found in the work of Durkheim, Lippmann, and Friedman has greatly influenced the business press, which tends to be “full of the danger of the masses and their rising power and how we have to defeat them. It’s kind of vulgar, inverted Marxism” (Chomsky, 1993, p. 67). What we find is that this self-serving perspective of those who benefit from class-based inequalities, in mainstream, dominant society, is presented as objective reality — as normalised and naturalised. However, because our humanity can be limited, but never completely destroyed, hegemony cannot be complete, and the less so, the more serious we take the wisdom of those who counter-hegemonically came before, and those who continue to generously contribute to the critical tradition.
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