A Marxist Argument for Stupidity: A Review of Derek R. Ford's 'Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy'

[“Kansas City Library” by calebdzahnd is licensed under CC BY 2.0]

By Bradley J. Porfilio

The most provocative books are those that don’t seek subversive theses for the sake of shock, but in order to reveal that which is most taken for granted and, in the process of questioning these underlying assumptions, reveal just how limiting they are. The most useful books for the communist tradition, in turn, are those that don’t only denounce or critique the present but actually imagine, develop, and propose alternatives as a result. Derek R. Ford’s latest book, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy accomplishes each of these tasks. What’s more, it deals with more academic theories in an accessible way, refusing the opposition between designating them as totally useless to the struggle or as the key insights we’ve been missing.

The book’s primary object of intervention is the “knowledge economy,” a term he uses reluctantly for a few reasons. One is that it’s popular parlance, but the second, and more substantive reason, is that doing so helps him identify what he calls a “troubling consensus” on the right and the left. The consensus is certainty not political, as the right and left wings differ greatly on their conception of knowledge, the conditions of its production, distribution, and consumption, and the political ends that should guide it. He doesn’t dismiss these and acknowledges that “how we understand capital’s relation to knowledge and the potential of the knowledge economy will matter a great deal in the political, social, and economic struggles ahead” (p. 57). Instead, the consensus amongst the most neoliberal and radical groupings is an unremarked pedagogy, which he calls the pedagogy of learning, realization, and grasping. In the introduction, he shows how these reinforce colonialist, ableist, and capitalist social relations.

Derek R. Ford’s Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (Palgrave, 2021)

He begins by assessing the different “takes” on the knowledge economy, accessibly and innovatively reading international policy documents from the OECD and WBI, their popular expressions in Richard Florida, as well as social democratic responses (like Andy Merrifield and Roberto Mangabeira Unger) and marxist critiques and responses, particularly those of the Italian marxist tradition (like Paolo Virno, Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, and others). This leads him into a deeper discussion of the role of the general intellect in the transition to post-Fordism and the knowledge economy.

Here, Ford not only synthesizes these transitions but, importantly, emphasizes how they were part of a struggle to define and participate in the general intellect of society—or part of the global class war. The general story concerns the limits to Fordist accumulation and the rebellions in the imperial core. But Ford highlights how “in the formerly colonized world, movements (some of which now had state power) linked the epistemological and political as they fought against imperialist economic and political domination,” (p. 45), citing Thomas Sankara’s praxis of fighting imperialist development alongside imperialist knowledge regimes as a paradigmatic example. Post-Fordism not only incorporated the demands of the imperial core but also absorbed the oppositional knowledges from the liberatory struggles of the world.

The educational consensus

He finds that the right wing pays the most explicit attention to education and the pedagogy of learning, which he links with the colonial grasping drive that positions every opacity as new potential knowledge to animate the accumulation of capital. Documenting the oppressive results of such a drive—including the perpetuation of ableism and colonialism—he shows that left projects ultimately rest upon the same pedagogical logic. He shows how contemporary marxist theorists naturalize learning and even locate it as an innate feature of “human nature,” such as in the conception of cognitive capitalism, which exploits the “desire… for learning.”

Yet whereas the right wants to control knowledge production to harness it to capital accumulation, the left wants to utilize knowledge to institute a new mode of production. “In this way,” he writes, “the left one-ups the right: ‘You want to tap into the infinite reserve of knowledge, but your small-minded thinking prevents you from understanding just how we can do that!” (p. 64). Capital is, simply, a fetter on knowledge production, one that actually inhibits the “natural” drive to learn. Thus, the Marxists end up reinforcing capital’s desire for knowledge and, as a result, the oppressive realities that follow from it. As one example, he turns to disability studies and, in particular autism. Citing Anne McGuire’s research on the flexible categories of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), he shows that the manual keeps getting more flexible and lengthier.

While the move away from the normal/abnormal binary might be progressive in some senses, it ends up reproduces the endless spiral of the knowledge economy. Ford links this with the workerist thesis of the primacy of labor over capital. Reading Mario Tronti, for example, “Even as it demystifies capital’s command and power, the workerist thesis, by privileging labor over capital, celebrates the limitless (and naturalized) productivism of labor and thus of learning” (p. 72). Ford’s book is the first to challenge the assumption that we should always be learning and that we should never stop learning. It poses the question: what if resistance and revolution demand an immersion in stupor?

An alternative pedagogy for an alternative mode of production

The most innovative and surprising proposal is to develop an alternative pedagogical logic that resists realization and the grasping drive. For Ford, this is the pedagogy of stupidity. He distinguishes stupidity from ignorance, in that ignorance can be addressed through learning whereas stupidity is intractable. He also distinguishes it from arrogance in that arrogance always has an answer, even if it’s wrong or faculty. “Stupidity, by contrast,” he writes, “never has an answer precisely because it undermines the question asked. When we’re in a state of stupor, we’re not even sure what the reference points for any discussion are” (p. 81). Ignorance and arrogance can produce knowledge for capital to enclose and expropriate, but stupidity, as he writes, is an anti-value, one that is infinitely unproductive.

Not content to remain at this level of abstraction, he provides different educational practices of stupid reading. He does so not to privilege stupidity at the expense of knowledge, but rather to introduce a necessary dialectical logic to learning. “The stupid life is a place for thought that endures without transforming into tacit or codified knowledge, or thinking the limits of thought” (p. 101). The concluding chapter presents an example of blocking these disparate yet related pedagogies together through an examination of Althusser and Negri’s marxism, which he argues are not so far apart once we consider the neglected pedagogical dimension to their different readings of Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital. In an unorthodox move, he presents this dialectic through the lens of Lyotard’s “general line,” arguing that we have to maintain a line between both pedagogies, and defend stupor from learnings attempts to annihilate it. Stefano Harney concludes his brilliant preface to the book with a quote that encapsulates the uncomfortable yet necessary argument advanced: “as Derek Ford sums it up perfectly: “there is always the noise from which knowledge emerges and to which it returns” (x).

It’s a necessary book for our moment, as organizers increasingly recognize the importance of educational processes to revolutionary transformation. In this sense, Ford’s book is a crucial offering to these movements.

Bradley Profilio, Professor and Director of the Ed.D. Leadership Program at the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San José State University, is a transformative scholar who brings insights from several intellectual disciplines, such as history, sociology, leadership studies, and social studies education, to examine the sociocultural and historical forces behind unjust educational outcomes and institutional forms of oppression. His intellectual work also unearths what policies, pedagogies, practices, and social movements hold the potential to humanize educational institutions, to eliminate educational disparities and to build an equalitarian society. As a result, his research has a broad appeal to scholars, leaders, and educators. As a leading scholar in critical pedagogy, he’s published dozens of books and articles about liberatory education. Most recently co-directed a documentary titled, We’re Still Here: Indigenous Hip Hop and Canada, which you can see here.

Assata Shakur: The making of a revolutionary woman

By Rachel Domond

Republished from Liberation School.

In commemorating Black August, we commemorate the struggle of those who have fought before us and faced violent repercussions from the state. We uplift the revolutionary history of the Black working class and its fundamental position in forging and leading the struggle for liberation for all. And we recommit ourselves to the struggle for Black Liberation and for the freedom of all political prisoners.

When I think of political prisoners, and when I think of those who have relentlessly committed themselves to Black Liberation, I always think of Assata Shakur.

From Assata’s story, we are able to learn what it means to be motivated by a deep love for the people and the struggle for freedom—and what it means to embody a determined and unbreakable spirit in the face of crackdowns and government repression designed to stifle and destroy the movement. Account after account from Assata’s comrades and fellow revolutionaries describe Assata as a light, a positive spirit who remained disciplined and committed to the struggle despite incredible hardships.

‘I wanted a name that had something to do with struggle’

Born JoAnne Byron, and married as JoAnne Chesimard, Assata Shakur changed her name in order to fully identify with the revolutionary struggles of her African heritage, and to honor her comrade Zayd Malik Shakur, who was murdered by state forces in 1971. She writes in her autobiography:

“I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur. Assata means ‘She who struggles,’ Olugbala means ‘Love for the people,’ and i took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and Zayd’s family. Shakur means “the thankful” [1].

Just as she was not born Assata, Shakur was not born a revolutionary. There is much to learn from her political development, and from the making of Assata into a revolutionary.

Born in Queens, NY, Assata Shakur was raised by her school teacher mother, her grandparents, and her aunt Evelyn A. Williams, a civil rights worker. From an early age, Assata’s family struggled financially, forcing her to run away frequently, often staying with strangers and working for short periods of time. After earning her GED, Assata went on to community college, and later The City College of New York, where she began her involvement in political activism. She participated in sit-ins, civil rights protests, and activism against the Vietnam War, first getting arrested with a hundred others after chaining herself to a building in protest of a lack of Black faculty and Black studies programs at the age of 20.

Coming of age in the 1960s and 70s, conditions were ripe with struggle on all fronts—from the Stonewall Rebellion to the Women’s Rights Movement to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements—conditions to politicize. After college, Assata moved to Oakland, CA, where she joined the Black Panther Party, participating in defense programs for the Black community. Some years later, she returned to NYC to lead the BPP in Harlem, coordinating programs like the famous Free Breakfast for Children program.

Assata studied the movements of oppressed and colonized people across the globe, and understood the common thread, as she elaborates on in her autobiography: that to rid the world of exploitation meant we must rid the world of capitalism. As she wrote about her radicalization:

“There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, there was not a single liberation movement in the whole world that was fighting for capitalism. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it” [2].

Assata knew that the internalized narrative that we, as oppressed peoples, and particularly Black people, just had to “make it” or “climb the ladder” could not and cannot be the basis of our total liberation as a people, because “anytime you’re talking about a ladder, you’re talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class,” and “as long as you’ve got a system with a top and a bottom, Black people are always going to wind up at the bottom” [3].

Assata knew we cannot elect or reform our way to freedom. She teaches us that in order to win our freedom, we would need to fight in the same way people across the globe have fought throughout history—through a socialist revolution. A revolution in which the power is held in the hands of the majority, the workers who create the wealth of society, in order to create a world in which the needs and well-being of the people are planned for and prioritized.

Assata Shakur: Guilty of fighting for freedom

COINTELPRO, the government counterintelligence program of the 60s and beyond, was created with the intention to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” Black nationalist and Black liberation organizations and their leaders [4]. It is now absolutely clear from FBI documents that since at least 1971, the FBI, in cooperation with the state and local law enforcement, conducted a campaign to specifically criminalize, defame, harass and intimidate Assata Shakur. The U.S. government saw Assata’s dedication to the cause and leadership within the Black sovereignty movement as a threat to the internal security of the United States.

In 1971, Assata and her two comrades Sundiata Acoli and Zayd Shakur were pulled over by state troopers for a faulty tail light. The state troopers quickly escalated the situation, likely because they knew exactly who they were pulling over, drawing their guns and pointing. With her hands up, Assata was shot in the stomach. A shootout ensued, and the night ended with Assata’s comrade Zayd Shakur and one of the state troopers dead.

While forensic evidence backed up her account, Assata Shakur was sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison for the murder of a police officer, a crime she didn’t commit. Her trial and conviction were a result of the government conspiracy to destroy Black freedom fighters and the movement for liberation from capitalism. Along with her comrade Sundiata Acoli, Assata was thrown into prison—a men’s prison—where she faced, according to her attorney, the worst conditions that a woman prisoner had ever faced in the history of New Jersey. To this day, Acoli remains a political prisoner. The next time he’s eligible for parole he’ll be 94 years old.

Assata’s revolutionary spirit was not broken. She ultimately escaped from prison, and today lives in exile under the protection of socialist Cuba. The government crackdown on Assata Shakur and others who struggle for liberation makes clear one of the hardest lessons necessary for revolutionaries to learn: the revolutionary struggle must be scientific, rather than emotional. This does not mean decisions can’t be influenced by love or anger; Assata and others were guided by a deep love for the people. Rather, our struggle must be based on the objective conditions, rooted in analysis of the historical and contemporary contexts.

Assata taught me, Assata taught we

Assata learned that no one has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to their oppressor; she learned that our oppressors are never going to give us the education needed to overthrow them. She learned that socialism isn’t just a white man’s concoction, because she studied the works of African revolutionaries and the goals of African liberation movements, as well as those of other colonized places. She learned that socialism was not an evil ideal designed to strip us of our freedoms, as we are told; because Assata knew that under capitalism, we don’t have any freedoms but to starve, to be homeless, or to be thrown in jail for being poor. Assata teaches us all that socialism can and will be achieved when the oppressed peoples of the world join together in struggle for a future free of exploitation.

This Black August, we are challenged to honor, learn from and continue the work of those who have struggled before us. In order to win, as Assata taught us, we must understand the role of discipline, the role of organization, and the need to stay in the streets to demand and fight for the society we want to see. As Assata herself said

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains” [5].

References

[1] Shakur, Assata. (1987/2001).Assata: An autobiography(New York: Lawrence & Hill), 186.
[2] Ibid., 190. For other related excerpts in her autobiography curated by the blogInvent the Future, see Liberation Staff. (2016). Assata Shakur on capitalism, socialism and anti-communism,Liberation News,16 January. Availablehere.
[3] Shakur,Assata, 190.
[4] Flint, Taylor G. (2013). How the FBI conspired to destroy the Black Panther Party,In These Times, 04 December. Availablehere.
[5] Shakur,Assata, 52.

Philosophizing With Lightning?: A Review of 'Metamodernism: The Future of Theory'

By Peter Fousek

In the opening of his recently published third book, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, philosopher Jason Josephson Storm writes that, in his latest text, he intends “to philosophize with lightning” (Storm 5). An endnote clarifies the meaning of his metaphor: lightning is both powerfully destructive and brilliantly illuminating. That simultaneously negative and positive character is an apt analogy for the project of Metamodernism, which works to expose the shortcomings of established intellectual practice while creating a new, progressively rooted and analytically oriented theory of the social world as a guide for future scholarship and activism. Writing an academic book review is outside of my normal wheelhouse; nonetheless, having worked as a research assistant for Storm, and as a result having had the opportunity to speak with him about the inspiring implications of Metamodernism, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about the book on a political platform. Because, at its essence, Metamodernism is revolutionary philosophy, culminating in a liberating political imperative.

Transformative social movements require united mass support in pursuit of a collectively held goal. For a progressive, justice-oriented campaign to be effective, it needs a solid theoretical foundation capable of producing a shared understanding of society in the minds of its members, and a corresponding conviction about why and how they should build a better world. The highly influential revolutionary praxis of Marxism is rooted in the theoretical basis of historical materialism; that theory has provided the impetus for wide-scale activism and mobilization, has guided the organization and direction of countless movements around the world. Storm’s theory possesses similar strengths: Metamodernism provides a comprehensive understanding of the social world, motivated by a fervent and fundamental belief in radical compassion, social justice, and egalitarian mutualism. From these values, it establishes a rigorously systematic philosophical mode, with which we may not only analyze and understand our world, but also learn how best to change it in pursuit of those underlying motivations.

Storm’s project is broken up into four different parts: Metarealism, Process Social Ontology, Hylosemiotics, and Knowledge and Value. To demonstrate how the book builds into a call for political action, it may be most effective to work backwards from its final chapters to the theoretical basis for their claims. Metamodernism’s Chapter 7, “The Revaluation of Values,” is its most explicitly political. His focus there is on the role of morals and ethical values in the scholarship of the “human sciences” (Storm 1)–Storm’s umbrella term for disciplines in the humanities and social sciences—as well as the role played by those values in political society more broadly. Breaking from the position that the moral relativism of the postmodern movement has ushered in a post-moral era, he shows that ethical values are a foundational element of the social world, and, consequently, that the study of that world necessitates their consideration and implementation.

When studying processes of social formation and the people who take part in them, it is imperative to analyze the values held by individuals and groups, which motivate their behaviors and influence the beliefs through which they come to understand themselves and their world. Further, Storm argues, if academic and intellectual projects within the human sciences are to offer meaningful commentary and critique, capable of honestly informing us about the nature of our world, they must reflectively acknowledge the ethical values that form the basis of their scholarly position. According to Metamodernism, “we need to bring our values to the surface and submit them to further scrutiny and refinement” in order “to make progress” (Storm 238). This is because moral values are inseparable from the social world, and any attempt to eliminate them only “drove ethics underground,” (Storm 238), thereby concealing a hugely influential element of society and its dynamics. On that basis, anti-moral arguments often serve reactionary political ends, e.g. “attacking social justice as incompatible with scientific objectivity,” (Storm 238) and thereby giving an ostensibly intellectual justification for the silencing of progressive voices.

Storm goes beyond an exposition of the importance of values and the need for their acknowledgement, however. He proceeds to make the claim that, given their centrality, they should serve as both motive and guide for future scholarship in the human sciences, orienting that scholarship towards the creation of a better world rather than towards a deconstructive or otherwise limited understanding of an arbitrarily delineated category of study. In other words, Storm argues that the study of society should be a morally rooted endeavor, with ethically constituted goals. It should not take place in the isolation of ivory towers, but instead should engage and interface with the subject of its study. Scholarship, in the metamodernist view, should be openly and unabashedly political, providing the knowledge and inspiration behind future political action.

The project of Metamodernism is itself an excellent example of such politically invested scholarship. Its first six chapters are dedicated to the establishment of a Grand Theory, a new and comprehensive philosophical mode that attempts to explain the nature of the social world. To that end, Storm opens with a chapter that works to produce an understanding of reality, moving beyond ideological debates disguised as existential arguments in its investigation. The “metarealist” position which Storm arrives at demands a nuanced, multi-modal understanding of reality, which allows for his subsequent study of social construction. Part II of Metamodernism, containing chapters two through four, begins by demonstrating the inadequacies of existing scholarly modes to produce sufficiently meaningful and valid scholarship. These inadequacies stem from a failure to recognize the dynamic, processual nature of the social world and the elements that make it up, which Storm labels “social kinds” (Storm 106). Social kinds are determined by anchoring processes: causal relations which produce a set of characteristics, or power-clusters, that are shared by members of a given social kind. Those power-clusters then endow their corresponding social kinds with causal-relational roles in broader processual networks. Socioeconomic class, for instance, could be thought of as a social kind determined by its relations of production (a causal anchoring process), and characterized by certain economic, social, or political attributes (power-clusters relating to and explained by the anchoring process). Viewing the world through the lens of social kinds enables a thorough, reflective, and progressive method of analysis and understanding, which resists imposed or inherited beliefs and assumptions and works to de-reify social formations and their constituent elements.

Having established an understanding of social kinds, Storm goes on to produce a corresponding theory of meaning in Metamodernism’s Part III. Chapter 5 proposes a “minimal metaontology,” (Storm 164) which pairs ontology with semiotics, language with material reality. The metaontology of Chapter 5 considers language to be a medium in which the mind interfaces with the world, facilitating a dialectically constitutive relationship between the two. The sentient mind, according to Storm, understands the world semiotically. From the interaction and engagement between the mental and physical emerge concepts of meaning, as the mind, through experience, comes to recognize certain signs as the signifiers of power-clusters, and thus of social kinds. Thus, meaning and understanding are predicated on mind-body interdependence, rather than dualism. Further, because people can externalize the contents of their consciousness via the materialization of cognitive signs, thought is a collective process which utilizes “public concepts,” (Storm 201): the already materialized signs that influence and inform our individual understandings of self and social world.

This brings us to Part IV, which crescendos into Chapter 7. Chapter 6, “Zetetic Knowledge,” (Storm 209), establishes a theory of “humble, emancipatory knowledge” (Storm 215) which allows for the possibility of uncertainty while resisting a denial of our ability to know things at all. Storm’s theory of knowledge incorporates doubt, but resists the kind of crippling skepticism which refuses to move past an initial stage of doubting. His incorporation of doubt is a subversion of certainty; this means that we cannot assert that we do not know. Rather, using the metamodernist mode of analysis based on causal anchoring and processual power-clusters, we can evaluate the relative truthfulness of any knowledge claim by analyzing it using evidence-based abductive reasoning, working backwards from hypothesis to cause while ruling out any alternative explanations. This abductive method of knowledge creation enables us to discover the unobservables which underlie the evidence which we attempt to explain.

Metamodernism is worth reading in full; the depth and systematic construction of Storm’s latest monograph make it difficult to summarize. Nonetheless, the outline above at least hints at the underlying revolutionary motivation of the metamodernist project. In the latter sections of Chapter 7, Storm explicitly states the values that have inspired and guided his philosophy. He argues that our sociopolitical activity should be motivated by a central, collective conviction: to promote universal human flourishing through collectivism and equity. “This,” Storm asserts, “has concrete implications for the kind of state or community we need to call into being…I want to call for a politics dedicated toward compassion, so that injustice can truly be overcome” (Storm 269). In a society presently dedicated to callous individualism, a compassionate politics is necessarily revolutionary. It demands that we work to alleviate the suffering of all those who go this journey of life alongside us, that we prioritize the wellbeing of all above any other concern.

This revolutionary political imperative, the pursuit of universal human flourishing, progresses naturally from the theory outlined earlier. It provides a guiding motive value to situate and inspire work in philosophy, the human sciences, and more broadly in our social formations and activity in general. If values are an omnipresent element of the social world, then we must reflect on those that influence us. If certainty of knowledge is impossible, then our values ought to reflect a corresponding humility; if the social world is dynamic, composed of innately processual social kinds, then our morals should be similarly accommodating, striving to cultivate the multiplicity of sentient life and the societies that it produces. Most importantly, metamodernism provides us with a critical-reflective lens through which we may arrive at a deeper understanding of our world and our positions in it.

That understanding is one which compels us to engage in a continuous, dynamic process of personal and societal cultivation and therefore demands empathy, egalitarianism, and the pursuit of collective good. It allows us to recognize the economic and political elements that reinforce injustice and inequality, and offers us the ability to overcome those elements by exposing and deconstructing detrimental social kinds and establishing alternative ones instead, rooted in metamodernist values. In Storm’s own words, “in order to actually produce meaningful change, we need to know how social kinds come into being and how their properties are glued together” (Storm 275). Metamodernism seeks to do just that, integrating an extensive knowledge of past and present, history and thought, with a moral imperative meant to goad and guide sociopolitical activism in pursuit of a more equitable, humane society. To transform the world, we must first understand it, and, in addition, understand what it could be.

The Pseudo-Cyclical Time of Non-Events

Art by Mimmo Rotella (1960)

By Michael Templeton

A man walked into a local bank, right in the symbolic center of the city itself, and randomly opened fire on anyone he saw in the bank. He killed three people. This was one of numerous events just like it around the United States. Random shootings occur with such frequency that they pass with barely a notice. People react with a modicum of shock. Public officials make their pronouncements of sympathy and outrage. By now, there are internet memes mocking the obligatory “thoughts and prayers” offered by political leaders. Then there are symbolic calls for gun legislation. The defenders of the second amendment push back. All the same bullshit gets exchanged. It is a dull round that disappears from memory almost as soon as it happens.

Soon after this happened, everything went back to normal. The events of the day consisted of local crimes, a nod to the “important events of the nation,” and sports and weather. After devoting hours of airtime to the event, images of the event went to their websites where it stayed for months. Scroll through the day’s events and at the bottom of the page you find a replay of the horrible shooting. The event simultaneously disappears and remains suspended in perpetual image-time. The event of the horrible shooting faded quickly, but the images of the event remained suspended in cyber-time—remained suspended in a space that has no space and a time that is disconnected from the passing of real human time. The usual vapid feel-good stories of children who survive cancer and local churches doing great things for the community, etc. But the fact is, people forgot about the shooting. And yet, images of the shooting persisted on social media for weeks. The event was instantly superseded by the rush of other events, and the relative significance of events did not matter. Or rather, the significance of events was and is weighted according to criteria which may or may not have anything to do with the humane value of events or the impact events may have on everyday life. The event of the shooting simply got washed away in the flood of new events. However, the images persist online and on various other electronic media.

The time of events is fleeting. The time in which individuals can engage images of the event is different. There are two forms of time: the synchronic time of the image which remains constant, and diachronic time of everyday life which changes from day to day—even moment to moment. The synchronic time of the image is the time available for exchange; diachronic time belongs to individuals and has no exchange value. Yet, in both cases, the events are mediated by images. There is image-time in the present, and there is perpetual, or cyclical image-time. The immediacy of the event is unknowable except for a few people. Participation and consumption of images of the event unfolds in two different strata of time.

Shootings like this occur with regularity in the United States, and the fallout is precisely the same in just about every case. There is the event, the momentary media signification of the event—this includes the pollical stage-show, and then instant forgetting except for the images of the event which replay forever. Any and all knowledge of events is mediated by images. Symbolic participation happens via images. Immediacy is instantaneously overtaken and subsumed by mediation, and the force of events are instantaneously overtaken by the dislocated isolation of time that has no duration. Situating a mediated presence into the past of real events, individuals remove themselves from actual life. Mediation and consumption of the image become supplements to lived experience. Hashtags serve to insinuate words into online mediated participation and remove any and all substance. “#grief” takes the place of grief as a signifier for the complex set of lived emotions which constitute grief. Life becomes a system of empty signifiers in the no-time of mediated images of things which no longer exist.

Our modern experience of time is one in which everything takes place on an abstract plane of continuous play. The time of immediate events is immediately lost. Even those who lived the experience and horror of a random shooting are forgotten. The time of abstraction in the form of endless images remains eternal. The only thing which has meaning is the eternal time of the images of events. Like the abstract space of the highway, we live in the abstract time of the stream of images. We are no longer even contained by the images of a day; we now participate in an eternity of images in cyber-time where the images of the events can and do play on forever. Since few of us will ever experience the horror of a random shooting, but everyone needs to know that they are participants in such events. The masses are able to insinuate themselves into the spectaculum of the events via consumption of the images. We are now able to transform consumption into an interactive pseudo-experience with the use of hashtags on social media. The shooting in Cincinnati led to #cincinnatistrong. Sympathy and support are provided by proxy with the use of the hashtag. When others use or search the hashtag, those who used it will be recognized via their images as participants in the horrifying event. The event exists in image-time and individual participation in the event is created through the hashtag and places individual images into the image-time of the event. The hashtag guarantees that once we insert our own image-participation, it will become part of the grand flow of other image-participations.

At the same time, the insertion of signifiers into the stream of images guarantees eternal separation from actual events. I gain access to the stream of images which signify the event, and I am able to remove myself to a space of non-existence. I do not even need to be a real person in order to insinuate my participation in the stream of images which constitute my image-participation. “I” exist in the eternal time of separation and isolation. The mediation of the consumable of event forecloses any real contact between real people. Participation by proxy in the image-time of the event is paid for with complete isolation in the world of physical lived experience. Image-time is the time of the commodity. Images are commodities exchanged endlessly in the market of commodities. This is a time outside of time. It unfolds without regard for everyday life. Image-time takes place in the heaven of the commodity where exchange follows the cyclical time of eternity. Everything always comes back to where it was. Like the cyclical time of the pre-modern world in which time was nothing more than the endless cycles of nature and God, the time of commodities and the time of the image endlessly comes back to an eternal present tense so that each new day offers the same exchangeable image of the event.

This all comes to the schiz between human time, the time that is lived by bodies in the world, and pseudo-cyclical time, time-as-commodity. Lived time, the time of everyday life, has no value, has no meaning unless it is entered into the ledgers of exchange. The time of people’s lives is meaningless until it takes on the false form of objectification in spectacular form. Experience must be projected onto the screen of the spectacle in order to take on meaning and value. Time only has meaning and value to the extent that time has exchange value, to be precise. There is no time unless it can be exchangeable for either more time or something else of value. What I do is meaningless and insignificant-- remains unsignified-- except insofar as that time enters into the system of exchange as a commodity like all other commodities. Time measured by a clock which is calibrated against all other clocks, churning out regulated blocks of time each of which carries a specific value measured against other units of value, forever amen—this is the only time that is substantial. The great irony is that this “substantial” time is nothing but abstraction. The time of living bodies is material. It cannot be measured against any other standard other than itself. Time-as-commodity can be measured, quantified, and valued. It has no substance, but it is all that can be known. Time-as-commodity takes on the appearance of cyclical time because it is experienced as perpetually renewing itself with every new day the market finds value in the representations of time. It is pseudo-cyclical time to the extent that it “is in fact merely the consumable disguise of the time-as-commodity of the production system, and it exhibits the essential traits of time: homogeneous exchangeable units, and the suppression of any qualitative dimension” (Debord, 110). While the time of image-participation unfolds in the seemingly infinite duration of cyclical time, it is in fact discreetly measured units of time. The perception of a cyclical or eternal presence of the representation of events persists only as long as replaying these events constitutes marketable, consumable, and profitable units of time. We who experience this pseudo-cyclical time forfeit our lived experience in favor of participation in image-time, the time of the image which exists in pseudo-cyclical time. Isolation and separation become the fate of individuals as we hand over our experience to image-participation in pseudo-cyclical time. In the end, our failure to commit to time as commodity will de-value representations. At which point, representations of events and our vicarious position as participants will dissolve. We and the event will fade back into the anonymity of the unsignified, unknowable, and irrelevant ephemera.

As the time of lived experience fades into the illegible under the eternal time of time-as-commodity, the time marked by image-participation, lived experience becomes another commodity. Our real lived experience pales in comparison to the experience we gain by those experiences prescribed and offered by the spectacle. Waiting for experiences to be signified by the generators of images of experience, we simply find our external space of experience and insinuate ourselves into it. We become apparitions taking possession of the outward forms of experience, and lived experience is devalued and denatured:

The dominant trait of the spectacular-metropolitan ethos is the loss of experience, the most eloquent symptom of which is certainly the formation of that category of “experience”, in the limited sense that one has “experiences” (sexual, athletic, professional, artistic, sentimental, ludic, etc.). In the Bloom, everything results from this loss, or is synonymous with it. Within the Spectacle, as with the metropolis, men never experience concrete events, only conventions, rules, an entirely symbolic second nature, entirely constructed. It imposes there a radical schism between the insignificance of everyday life, called “private”, where nothing happens, and the transcendence of a history frozen in a sphere called “public”, to which no one has access. (Theory of the Bloom, 48)

Everyday life, private life—this is where nothing ever happens because “real” experience cannot be known or understood outside the performances constructed by the spectacle. Image time is constructed according to algorithms, SEO analysis, “hits” on social media accounts—these are the metrics of experience, and we are left behind in the day to day which takes place in a void. Time is an abstract formal eternity in the infinite space of the image-sphere.

Lived experience takes its meaning from an other scene, as it were. Something of an unconscious provide meaning for lived experience, but this unconscious is not within individual minds. It is now the projection of experience into the spectacular realm of image-time, or pseudo-cyclical time. The world of images is not subject to the passage of time. All images are simultaneous. All are old and new at the same time. Freud said that the unconscious has no time; it is always present, and every feature of the unconscious is always present. Our present world projects this into the heaven of images, and our own inner life and inner world withers from inanity. Everyday life is now the impoverished and banal content which exists to reveal the latent content of images. What is my life if I do not have followers on Instagram? And the Real of my life is of no consequence in comparison to the images which stand in for me. Everyday life is now an illusion.

Even as an event as horrifying as a mass shooting, a mass shooting at school, even—nothing can merit the status of a real event until it has been evacuated of its interior substance and rendered as a timeless event in the world of images, in the world that is the spectacle. My individual forgetting of the event, anyone’s individual forgetting of the event is perfectly acceptable because there is an external form of the internal memory in the form of image-time which remembers for us in the manner of a prayer wheel. We do not need to send thoughts and prayers, the heaven of images is perpetually sending thoughts and prayers for us.

The medieval Great Chain of Being sutured everyone to a specific place in the cosmos. At the center and circumference of everything, there was God. The orders of being descended from heaven to earth and the King occupied the place of God’s vice-regent in this fallen world which included the passage of time. At the level of the individual, nothing mattered because one’s place was ordained and guaranteed by this divine order. The passage of time was marked by the passage of the seasons and the days. What happened on one day was only distinguishable from what happened on another day to the extent that the events were either present or past. There was no causality to events because causality was in the hands of God. The cycles of time were performed in the holy offices of the Church and at local festivals which marked the passing of one season to the next. But all time would cycle back to the same thing. Time was cyclical. Knowledge of the passing of time was projected outward onto the heavens which directed the passing of time.

In the pseudo-cyclical time of the spectacle, time once again belongs elsewhere. The passing of time and the significance of time are marked by spectacular performances. The cycle is sustained in the manner of pre-modern cyclical time by spectacular performances which mark the passing of events. But pseudo-cyclical time, the time of images, lacks the guarantee of God and the Great Chain of Being. Its eternal status is sustained by the fact that it is eternally consumable. Every image is just as consumable as every other image and in precisely the same way. You can download Bach’s St. John Passion as easily as you can download a digital cum shot. So it is that the consumable images of the shooting at the bank take on the eternal cycle of cyclical time. All mass shootings take on this cyclical disguise, when in fact they are nothing more than consumable images generated for the sole purpose of being consumed. As we consume them, our sense that we are participating in the Great Chain of Modern Events allows us to extract ourselves from real events and remain in our isolated pockets of emptiness. Like the medieval serfs whose lives were immaterial non-events in pre-modern culture, we have taken an analogous position of insignificant peasants under the heaven of image-time.

As our individual relations to actual events are overtaken by our solitary relations to the images of events, so our relations to each other have kept pace. The singular events of our lives are made real to the extent that they are linked to the events in image-time. Everyone who posted a photograph, a quotation from a great thinker, a prayer, a remembrance, etc. who also linked these things with the hashtag #cincinnatistrong became participants in the series of images which mark the event of the shooting. Anyone who did not use the hashtag remained completely isolated. And yet, the linkages of the hashtag are only made manifest to the extent that they are linked in image-time. The isolation of individual participants remains, and the hollowness of the sentiments becomes more pronounced as these words and images are pulled into the swirl of spectacular time and the logic of the spectacle. The endlessly exchangeable status of images and image-participation is ultimately subject to the same logic as any other image or any other commodity. Professions of faith, sympathy, and commitment rise into the ether of the image. A prayer is an image of a prayer is an image and only an image: a thing of nothing. Any images which may have taken on a life beyond the image-time of the event took its value entirely from its status as an object of exchange. The use-value of the prayer, if there is such a thing, is rendered ephemeral at best in its becoming a form of exchange-value. Individuals, in the beginning and the end, remains isolated monads delinked from the validity and reality of events and each other. The purported bond of the hashtag serves only to distance and isolate. Individual monads participate in isolation together.

The net result of the loss of real experience is the fission between individuals which is an overall dissolution of community. In the grand suburban existence that is contemporary America, a new metropolitan existence has come to define life. As experience is given over to the formal display of experience in the heaven of pseudo-cyclical time, the inevitable isolation among individuals takes on the form of experience rather than experience. The modern metropolis is a form without substance and experience consists of the images of substance without form. “At which point the loss of experience and the loss of community are one and the same” (The Bloom, 52). We live the supplement of life in the image. The throbbing metropolis is the dystopic non-place of empty space and timeless time: “In the metropolis, man purely undertakes the trial of his negative condition. Finitude, solitude and display, which are the three fundamental coordinates of that condition, weave the decor of the existence of each within the grand village. Not the fixed decor, but the moving decor, the combinational decor of the grand village, for which everybody endures the icy stench of their non-places” (The Bloom, 50). Image-time, pseudo-cyclical time, the non-space of the interstate—all of this serves the sprawling non-place of the modern metropolis where nothing is, where isolation offset by meaningless display define the emptiness of everyday life.

With this isolation and emptiness comes the outward display of false commitment and performances of substance. The more lived life becomes devoid of anything which could be construed as intrinsically meaningful, the more the performance of values and commitments becomes important. It is only the mass of isolated individuals living in self-imposed exile of unwilling anonymity which partakes of the empty image-participation which serves only to further their isolation. The image takes over for life as it is actually lived, and everyday life is devalued and rendered meaningless:

Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of the images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. (Debord, 12)

Images become the lie which stands in for real lived life, and the even the lie begins to believe itself. The reality of everyday life is supplanted by the image lodged in pseudo-cyclical time. In this way, the metropolis, or the suburban world in the United States, becomes the empty space of unreality where no meaningful connection can be established between individuals because the grid on which meaning and understanding can be established has been projected from the ground of life onto the non-life of the spectacle. Space and time no longer exist in the world of living individuals. Space and time are in the domain of images and commodity exchange. A projection of interior life which is in fact a performance of a pre-scripted form of life effectively negates interior life. The hashtags which constitute image-participation in the spectacular event of a mass shooting are the forms of belief which stand for an overall lack of belief. This is to say that individuals do not and cannot sustain real belief in anything like sympathy, grief, or even faith since these things have been evacuated of their content and replaced with images of sympathy, grief, and faith. Real people in the world cannot sustain these things in everyday life because everyday life has no content. Content is projected out into the formless spectacle, and the forms of life left to individuals have become devoid of content. It is under the dominance of image-time and the non-space created by the interstate that we arrive at our current state of contemporary life in the suburban metropolis where the logic of the Bloom takes shape:

The Bloom cannot take part in the world in an internal way.  It never enters there except in the exception of itself.  That is why it presents such a singular tendancy towards distraction, deja-vu, cliche, and above all, an atrophie of the memory which confines it inside an eternal present.  And that is why it is so exclusively sensitive to music, which alone can offer it abstract sensations -- it would here be necessary to evoke velocity and “friction coefficient”, which are also bloomesque pleasures, but this time it is abstraction itself which appears to them as sensation. (The Theory of the Bloom, 54)

It is only a people devoid of faith who feel the need to declare their faith with grotesque gestures and monuments. Thoughts and prayers for the victims of random shootings come from a population whose thoughts come in prescribed images and for whom prayers are histrionic performances of a total lack of faith. There are no more compelling atheists than those who do tricks in the service of faith. Creation theme parks, grotesque statues of Jesus Christ, religion.com, and professional Christians abound in this metropolis of emptiness. In this suburban metropolis devoid of substance where all that remains is the form of life, a diabolical inversion of belief takes the place of belief. Even as the heartfelt declarations of horror and sympathy poured out for the victims of the mass shooting, the individuals who authored these sentiments betray the fact that they no longer have access to the very conditions on which such sentiments can be formed. Isolation and contempt for everyone else are the only real attributes of the suburban metropolis.

He who cannot do anything but play with life needs the gesture, so that his life may become more real than a game adjustable in all directions.  In the world of merchandise, which is the world of generalized reversibility, where all things blend together and transform into one another, where everything is only ambiguity, transition, ephemerality and blending, only the gesture settles once and for all.  In the flash of its necessary brutality it cuts out the “after” that is insoluble in its “before”, which the ONE will regretfully have to recognize as definitive.

Michael Templeton is an independent scholar, writer, and musician. He completed his Ph.D. in literary studies at Miami University of Ohio in 2005. He has published scholarly studies and written cultural analysis, creative non-fiction, and poetry published in small independent publications. He currently works as a freelance writer providing articles for a non-profit called the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.

References

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone           Books,1995.

The Invisible Committee. Theory of the Bloom. Tr. Robert Hurley. Creative Commons. 2012.

Economic and Social Crises Keep Deepening: 48 Points That Will Shape the Future

By Shawgi Tell

Not only have the policies of the rich at home and abroad not stopped economic and social decline, the rich are actually taking social irresponsibility to new levels and making things worse worldwide. They are unable and unwilling to solve serious problems plaguing humanity. Opening the path of progress to society is not on their agenda.

Connecting just a few dots in an intelligible way produces a clear picture of the destruction unfolding worldwide. It is no accident that more people are writing about a miserable dystopian future where people will have to develop new creative ways of defending the rights of all. The information below is especially timely given the cheap euphoria displayed recently by the short-sighted rich and their political and media representatives about the “solid” 850,000 jobs the U.S. economy “added” in June 2021.

1. Inflation is increasing rapidly at home and abroad and the dollar’s purchasing power is still falling.

2. Globally, supply chains affecting many sectors are not operating smoothly; many are worried about contrived and non-contrived disruptions lasting for months, even years.

3. Ransomware incidents and major cyberattacks are not diminishing.

4. Millions of U.S. workers are misclassified as contractors, which means that they do not have (generally weak) protections.

5.  Thousands of companies at home and abroad are “zombie companies”—i.e., they don’t make a profit after paying down their debts, they just live a dead life.

6. Student debt in the U.S. keeps soaring.

7. College tuition in the U.S. and elsewhere keeps climbing.

8. Marriage rates in the U.S. are at an all-time low.

9. Birthrates are declining globally.

10. The U.S. experiences a higher infant mortality rate and a higher prevalence of obesity compared with most OECD member countries.

11.  The number of Americans who have moved back in with family or friends over the past 18 months is extremely high.

12. Homelessness is high nationwide and increasing significantly in some major U.S. cities; crime is also up.

13. Various “reforms” in countless sectors in many countries are superficial, phony, and non-substantive.

14. Anxiety and depression remain widespread worldwide.

15. Anti-depressant use remains high.

16. Mass murders and killings have increased in recent years in the U.S.; so have social and civil unrest.

17. Everyone everywhere is skeptical of the mainstream media and struggling not to be confused, ambushed, and humiliated every hour.

18. Around the world hundreds of millions have joined the ranks of the poor over the past 18 months.

19. Globally, well over ten million business have disappeared permanently and thousands more will disappear in the next five years.

20.  Leading economic experts and officials have no real solutions for anything and people continually have low levels of trust in “experts” and government; the rich continue to operate with impunity.

21. There is more polarization, division, and anger in society.

22. Poverty and inequality keep growing worldwide; wealth concentration is staggering and unprecedented.

23. Digital addiction and attendant problems won’t stop increasing.

24. More U.S. college and university administrators, trustees, and leaders are abandoning the intellectual mission of colleges, restricting faculty voice, and turning college into Disney and fun.

25. Getting simple things done is taking longer and becoming more convoluted and frustrating, especially when dealing with retailers, companies, and various agencies.

26. Surveillance and police-state arrangements are multiplying rapidly and becoming more diverse and sophisticated at home and abroad.

27. The media blackout on thousands who continue to experience serious side effects from vaccines continues.

28. Newly-elected “progressive” politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere are proving to be as ineffective as the “old guard.”

29. Privatization and deregulation keep increasing and wreaking havoc worldwide.

30. Anglo-American imperialism thinks that constantly treating China and Russia as bogeymen will keep fooling the gullible and divert attention from deep problems in the Anglo-American world.

31. The unionization rate of American workers is at a historic low, which is bad for all workers in all sectors.

32. More than 130 million working Americans can live off their savings for six months or less before going broke.

33. Mergers and acquisitions continue apace in 2021, concentrating even more wealth in even fewer hands.

34. Central banks around the world keep printing phantom money while stock market bubbles grow larger.

35. The U.S labor force participation rate remains low.

36. The number of long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more) in the U.S. is still increasing.

37. Millions of Americans have started to lose their jobless benefits.

38. More than 40% of Black families and Latino families in the U.S. have no access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan.

39. Black and Latino Americans are experiencing the biggest decline in life expectancy in decades.

40. In recent years, overall job quality for Americans has deteriorated significantly.

41. At least thirty million Americans lack access to high-speed internet.

42. The U.S. opioid overdose crisis, which pharmaceutical companies were recently found guilty of sponsoring, persists.

43. In Africa, nearly 40% of employed youth are considered poor.

44. Around the world, nearly one out of ten people experience hunger and the number of undernourished people has grown by millions in recent years.

45. The official unemployment rate exceeds 10% in at least 12 countries in (Western and Eastern) Europe. Fourteen countries fall into this category for North and South America. The real numbers are higher.

46. More than 27% of youth in Central Asia and Southern Asia are not in employment, training, or education.

47. In the past five years more countries have experienced violent conflict, while violent crime across the world has also increased.

48. Despite endless happy economic news in the mainstream media, economies around the world are far from recovering; many never recovered from the Great Recession of 2008 and mass vaccinations will not solve deep structural economic problems.

The list goes on and on. This is the tip of the iceberg. Numerous problems persist on all continents. The facts above do not paint a picture of a bright and promising future for humanity. Widespread destruction prevails in the obsolete neoliberal world.

But there are also openings and contradictions that people from all walks of life are being compelled to harness in order to advance the public interest and restrict the illegitimate control and authority of major owners of capital. The desire for real progress is palpable and growing; it emerges from the concrete conditions as they present themselves today. The international financial oligarchy cannot provide any solutions to the problems plaguing humanity today, they just have more catastrophes in store for everyone and are blocking the empowerment of the people. None of these serious problems can be solved, however, so long as the people remain marginalized and disempowered. A new direction, orientation, and public authority are urgently needed.

Humanity is entering a new and deeper crisis with qualitatively different and more dangerous features. Crisis is a turning point that contains both peril and opportunity. Crisis is not always just a negative thing; it means things cannot continue in the old way and something significant is going to have to eventually give. It usually takes a serious crisis or trauma to catalyze and propel much-needed change. In this way, crisis overcomes stagnation and complacency and sets the stage for something new. The negation of the negation operates with a greater vengeance in such defining moments, giving rise to a new synthesis, a new equilibrium, which gives rise to yet another dynamic which must assert itself sooner or later. The dialectic lives and cannot be extinguished. What comes next in the complicated here and now is unfolding consciously and spontaneously.

The pace and rate of change today is exhilarating and people’s desire to protect the social and natural environment is growing. The trial of strength between capital-centered forces and human-centered forces is bound to increase because conditions are demanding a new authority that affirms the rights of all. An alternative is necessary and possible. What this will look like is in the hands of the people themselves. Only they can be relied on to usher in a bright future for humanity free of privileged private interests wrecking the social and natural environment.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

Countless Charter Schools Hire Many Uncertified Teachers

By Shawgi Tell

Privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools[1] run by unelected officials are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. About 7,400 charter schools currently enroll roughly 3.3 million students.

According to a 2018 state-by-state information chart from the Education Commission of the States, more than 25 states (including Washington, DC) either do not require charter school teachers to be certified or allow charter schools to hire a large portion of teachers with no teaching certification.[2]

It should also be noted that, on average, charter school teachers have fewer years of teaching experience and fewer credentials than their public school counterparts. They also tend to work longer days and years than public school teachers while generally being paid less than them. Further, many charter school teachers are not part of an employee retirement plan and are treated as “at-will” employees, which is linked to why 88% of charter school teachers are not part of any organization that defends their collective interests.

A few examples of charter schools with uncertified teachers are worth noting. A May 30, 2019 article in The Palm Beach Post titled, “Underpaid, undertrained, unlicensed: In PBC’s largest charter school chain, 1 in 5 teachers weren’t certified to teach,” points out that the Renaissance Charter School chain in Florida routinely employed large numbers of substitute teachers and operated many schools where a quarter to a third of the teachers were not certified to teach.

Several years ago, one of the main charter school authorizers in New York State unilaterally further lowered teaching qualifications for teachers in charter schools. It willfully ignored numerous public demands to not further dilute teaching standards, prompting a lawsuit against its arbitrary actions. An October 18, 2019 press release from New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) titled, “Court rejects fake certification scheme for charter school teachers,” reads in part:

After the union fought back against “fake” certification for some charter school teachers, a midlevel appeals court this week ruled the SUNY Charter Schools Committee does not have the authority to set its own standards for certifying teachers. NYSUT President Andy Pallotta said the court ruling is a big win for the union and the profession. “This is about preserving what it means to be a teacher in New York State,” Pallotta said. “This would have created a two-tiered certification system and allowed unqualified educators to practice in some charter schools.”

While public school teachers in North Carolina have to be trained and certified to teach in public schools, charter schools are exempt from such requirements and can hire uncertified non-educators to teach. And while they enroll a significant percentage of youth, in Arizona “Teachers at charter schools are not required to have any certification.” Importantly, privately-operated charter schools are notorious for relying heavily on the infamous Teach for America (TFA) program which has come under fire for many reasons over the years. Much of this criticism comes from formers TFA’ers themselves. Many other examples from across the nation could be given.

Taken together, these facts help explain why there is such persistently high teacher turnover rates in the crisis-prone charter school sector—a situation that increases instability and does not serve students and families well. Given the broad disempowerment and marginalization of charter school teachers, it is no accident that there has been an uptick in recent years in the number of charter school teachers striving to unionize. The most recent example comes from Chicago.

It is not possible to build a modern society and nation by creating more corporatized schools that are segregated, non-transparent, deregulated, created by private citizens, run by unelected officials, and staffed with a large number of uncertified teachers. Who thinks this is a great idea? Such neoliberal arrangements lower the level of education and are a slap in the face of thousands of teacher education students across the country who spend years and thousands of dollars training to become effective certified teachers.

Notes

[1] The “non-profit” versus “for-profit” distinction is generally a distinction without a difference: both types of entities engage in profit maximization. Charter school promoters always downplay the fact that there are many charter schools, including “non-profit” charter schools, run by for-profit entities.

[2] Public schools sometimes hire uncertified teachers as well, but what makes the corporatized charter school sector different is that many charter school laws are intentionally and explicitly set up to evade certified teachers. This usually has to do with the neoliberal goal of “cost-cutting” and profit maximizing. Such a set-up lowers the level of education.

Bourgeois Education and the Reproduction of Common Sense

By Christian Noakes

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

Despite right-wing conspiracy theories depicting universities as a communist threat to capitalist society, academia serves as a primary institution in the reproduction of the bourgeois common sense on which capitalism relies. Furthermore, it presents its own version of knowledge as not only self-evident but “progressive,” while denouncing any effective attempt to confront capitalism and imperialism.

With a few flips of intellectual gymnastics, it often asserts that Marxism is the “master’s tools.” As such, it presents Marxism as an oppressive force and bourgeois thought as a force of liberation—albeit one in need of periodic reforms. Fundamental to this inversion is the complete misunderstanding—or at least misrepresentation—of both Marx and the larger historical tradition of Marxism.

Marx is typically treated as a class reductionist who never addressed the interrelated issues of racism, colonialism, and slavery. However, all three of these are given significant attention by Marx and were in fact treated as fundemental to the capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession, and exploitation. One needn’t delve deep into Marx’s writings to begin to see this. In the first pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state:

“The discovery of America, the rounding of the cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie... The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”[1]

Elsewhere they state:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of negroes, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”[2]

Marx and Engels do not equivocate the role of racial oppression and colonialism which are both a means of capitalist expansion and an outgrowth of it. Not only are these pervasive forms of oppression central to the birth of capitalism, but confronting these twin evils of racism and colonialism are essential to combating capitalism today. This is no doubt what Marx means when he noted that, “labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded.”[3] In other words, capitalist exploitation cannot be eradicated so long as racial oppression remains intact.

To even talk about class within the hallowed walls of the academy is too often assumed to be a “white issue”—a convenient assumption that obscures the material reality of racial oppression. The explicitly anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-slavocratic sentiments in the writings of Marx suggest that many who, in good faith, claim Marxism is implicitly “white”—and therefore conserving racial oppression—are drawing such conclusions without doing the readings. Under the influence of bourgeois thought that pervades capitalist educational institutions, “one knows it is absurd without reading it and one doesn't read it because one knows it is absurd, and therefore one glories in one's ignorance of the position.”[4]

This fundemental misunderstanding—premised on hubristic ignorance—goes far beyond Marx and Engels to encompass all of Marxism. The Guyanese guerrilla intellectual Walter Rodney argued that the perennial debate on the relevance of Marxism across time and place is both an outgrowth of the dominant bourgeois ideology and a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxism.[5] Contrary to an understanding of Marxism as a static manual of revolution, Rodney points out that Marxism is a living thing—a methodology and ideology which concerns itself with material relations in the service of the oppressed and exploited classes.

As a methodology or a scientific lens of analysis, Marxism concerns itself with the material conditions of society, the relations of production which exist—in various forms—across time and place. Marx, and the Marxist tradition which has developed from his contributions to the revolutionary struggle, give considerable attention to the particular relations of production under capitalism—a system into which the Global South has long been forced at gun point. Rejecting Marxism as irrelevant to any context outside of 19th Century Europe follows the same logic as if one were to claim that the theory or relativity—and other developments in physics built on such understandings—only applies to the world Einstein inhabited.[6]

To deny the relevance of Marxist methodology is to inadvertanly suggest that relations of production (especially the predominant capitalist relations) do not exist—a bourgeois position that serves to preserve capitalist exploitation and the racial/colonial relations which underpin it. Despite the often good intentions, such assertions are inevitably in line with bourgeois ideology in that they serve to reproduce the common sense of capitalism which both naturalizes and obscures the social relations of capital. Such academic positions also ignore the historical role of Marxism in national liberation struggles throughout the Global South—an historical fact that makes the question of the relevance of Marxism itself irrelevant.

However, the relationship between Western academia and the Global South is not simply a matter of the erasure of national liberation struggles; it is also openly antagonistic in that the former provides the intellectual justification for imperialism under a facade of progress.

For the sake of brevity, we will limit ourselves to recent events in Bolivia.

On 10 November 2019, the Indigenous President Evo Morales was ousted in an apparent coup. Support for this coup—which would quickly reveal itself as deeply anti-Indigenous and reactionary—included a letter signed by several US academics. Signatories included the anthropologist Devin Beaulieu, a vocal opponent of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party. Beaulieu—like many other academics—framed their opposition to MAS in pro-Indigenous language. Central to this position has been the reduction of Indigeneity to a monolith in opposition to Morales.[7] This has, in a sense, included the construction of the Indio permitido (the authorized Indian). Under a progressive facade, academics like Beaulieu sit comfortably in the imperial core, deciding for themselves which Indigenous voices are legitimate. Not unlike their colonial predecessors, they rely on a deeply imperialist conception of progress as a modern “white man’s burden.”

Other academics are not so blatantly imperialist. For instance Fabricant and Postero correctly point out how treating Indigenous peoples as a monolith is akin to defining Indio permitido and Indio prohibido (the prohibited Indian).[8] Their acknowledgement of heterogenous Indigeneity is markedly different from the treatment seen in the likes of Beaulieu. However, despite this difference they too fall into the dichotomous thinking which frames MAS as both a capitalist movement for the mestizo and an opposition to Indigenous Bolivians. Despite their apparent attempts to provide balanced analysis, they conflate efforts toward self-determination via the utilization of the country’s natural resources and the fostering non-US trade relations as “capitalist” and “neoliberal,” when in reality not utilizing national resources means a continued subjugation of Bolivia to the imperial core—a position these academics ponder from relative comfort. These (not-so-blatant) imperialist academics also refer to concerns of Indigenous groups over national development as a concern of “further colonisation by Andean coca growers.”[9] Where these coca growers are, in fact, Indigenous, this position only succeeds in weaponizing anti-colonial rhetoric against the colonized.

All of the above is emphasized to say that bourgeois academia’s primary social function is to reproduce capitalist common sense and to reinvent capitalist society with ever-new, illusory facades of progress and liberation. As a central institution of the capitalist superstructure, the university as a whole cannot help but be anything else.

As Jose Carlos Mariategui observed:

“Vain is all mental effort to conceive the apolitical school or the neutral school. The school of bourgeois order will continue to be a bourgeois school. The new school will come with the new order.”[10]

This is not to say that individuals or groups cannot exist in opposition in such institutions or that no revolutionaries should attend university. Institutions of higher learning can and should be treated as sites of struggle from which guerilla intellectuals can, in a sense, redistribute the resources and means of knowledge production otherwise kept from the public.

Following in the footsteps of revolutionaries such as Marx and Rodney, Marxists should utilize capitalist institutions to better understand and combat capitalism. However, the bourgeois academy should never be treated as something that can be adequately reformed under capitalism; or, further, that bourgeois academia is the only source of knowledge production under capitalism. Indeed, a true guerrilla intellectual need not be of the academy at all, and, in fact, cannot be a true guerrilla intellectual if they are confined to the bourgeois institutions which serve only to reproduce capitalist common sense in opposition to the true struggles of liberation.

Endnotes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. In The Marx-Engles Reader (2nd ed.) Robert C. Tucker (ed), 275-276.

[2] Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. 1. (Chicago 1952), P.372.

[3] Karl Marx: On America and the Civil War (New York, 1972) p. 275.

[4] Walter Rodney (1975). “Marxism and African Liberation.” https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney- walter/works/marxismandafrica.htm.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jose Carlos Mariategui. “The World Crisis and the Peruvian Proletariat.” in Selected Works of José Carlos Mariátegui.

The Relevance and Failures of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

By Carlos Garrido

This year marks the 57th anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). This text, although plagued with a pessimistic spirit, was a great source of inspiration for the development of the New Left and the May 68 uprisings. The question we must ask ourselves is whether a text that predates the last 50 years of neoliberalism has any pertinent take-aways for today’s revolutionary struggles. Before we examine this, let us first review the context and central observations in Marcuse’s famed work.

Review

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man[i] (ODM) describes a world in which human rationality is uncritically used to perpetuate the irrational conditions whereby human instrumental ingenuity stifles human freedom and development. In the height of the cold war and potential atomic devastation, Marcuse observes that humanity submitted to the “peaceful production of the means of destruction” (HM, ix). Society developed its productive forces and technology to a scale never before seen. In doing so, it has created the conditions for the possibility of emancipating humanity from all forms of necessity and meaningless toil. The problem is, this development has not served humanity, it has been humanity that has been forced to serve this development. The instruments humans once made to serve them, are now the masters of their creators. The means have kidnapped the ends in a forced swap, the man now serves the hammer, not the other way around.

The observation that our society has developed its productive forces and technologies in a manner that creates the conditions for more human freedom, while simultaneously using the development itself to serve the conditions for our un-freedom, is not a new one. The Marxist tradition has long emphasized this paradox in the development of capitalism. Marcuse’s ODM’s novel contribution is in the elucidation of the depth of this paradox’s submersion, as well as how this paradox has extended beyond capitalism into industrialized socialist societies as well. Let us now examine how Marcuse unfolds the effects of modern capitalist instrumental rationality’s closing of the political universe.

Whereas the capitalism Marx would deal with in the mid-19th century demonstrated that along with clearly antagonistic relations to production, the working and owning class also shared vastly different cultures, modern one-dimensional society homogenizes the cultural differences between classes. Marcuse observes that one of the novelties of one-dimensional society is in its capacity to ‘flatten out’ the “antagonisms between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in higher culture” (HM, 57). This process liquidates two-dimensional culture and creates the conditions for social cohesion through the commodification, repressive desublimation, and wholesale incorporation and reproduction of these cultural elements into society by mass communication. In essence, the cultural differences the working and owning class had have dissipated, both are integrated in the same cultural logic. This does not mean there is no cultural opposition, but that the cultural opposition is itself “reduced” and “absorbed” into the society. Today, this absorption of the opposition is more visible than ever. Companies that donate millions to police departments post #BLM on their social medias, repressive state apparatuses who assaulted homosexuals in the 60s lavender scares now wave the LGBTQ+ flag, billion-dollar companies like Netflix who take loopholes to not pay taxes make a show on ‘democratic socialist’ Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, etc. All throughout our one-dimensional culture we experience the absorption of an ‘opposition’ whom in being absorbed fails to substantially oppose. This could be reformulated as, ‘all throughout our one-dimensional culture we experience the absorptions of any attempts at a great refusal, whom in being absorbed fail to substantially refuse.’

How did this happen? Well, in a way that paradoxically provides the material confirmation of Marxism as a science (according at least to Popper’s falsifiability requirement), while disconfirming one of its central theses, modern capitalism seems to have mended one of its central grave digging contradictions, the antagonistic contradiction between the proletariat and the owning class. According to Marcuse, modern industrial society has been able to do this because it provided the working masses (and society in general) a “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” (HM, 1). It superimposed on the working masses false needs which “perpetuate [their] toil, aggressiveness, misery,” and alienation for the sake of continuing the never-ending hamster wheel of consumption (HM, 5). In modern industrial society people are sold a false liberty which actively sustains them in a condition of enslavement. As Marcuse states,

Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation (HM, 8).

 In essence, that which has unnecessarily sustained their working life long, exploitative, and alienating, has made their life at home more ‘comfortable.’ This consumerist, Brave New World-like hellish heaven has perpetuated the prevalent ‘happy consciousness’ present in modern industrial society, where your distraction, comfort, and self-identification with your newly bought gadgets has removed the rebellious tendencies that arise, in a Jeffersonian-like manner, when the accumulation of your degradation reaches a certain limit where revolution becomes your panacea. The phenomenon of happy consciousness, says Marcuse, even forces us to question the status of a worker’s alienation, for although at work alienation might continue, he reappropriates a relation to the products through his excessive identification with it when purchased as a consumer. In this manner, the ‘reappropriation’ of the worker’s alienation to the product manifests itself like Feuerbach’s man reappropriating his species-being now that it has passed through the medium (alienated objectification) of God – the commodity here serving the mediational role of God.

The working mass, as we previously mentioned, is not the only one affected by the effects of one-dimensional society. Marcuse shows that the theorists are themselves participatory and promotional agents of this epoch. Whether in sociology or in philosophy, the general theoretical trends in academia are the same; the dominance of positivist thinking, and the repression and exclusion of negative (or dialectical) thinking. This hegemonized positivist thought presents itself as objective and neutral, caring only for the investigation of facts and the ridding of ‘wrongful thought’ that deals with transcendental “obscurities, illusions, and oddities” (HM, 170). What these one-dimensional theorists do is look at ‘facts’ how they stand dismembered from any of the factors that allowed the fact to be. In doing so, while they present their task as ‘positive’ and against abstractions, they are forced to abstract and reify the fact to engage with it separated from its context. By doing this these theorists limit themselves to engaging with this false concreteness they have conjured up from their abstracting of the ‘fact’ away from its general spatial-temporal context. Doing this not only proves to be futile in understanding phenomena – for it would be like trying to judge a fight after only having seen the last round – but reinforces the status quo of descriptive thinking at the expense of critical and hypothetical thought. As Marcuse states,

This radical acceptance of the empirical violates the empirical, for in it speaks the mutilated, “abstract” individual who experiences (and expresses) only that which is given to him, who has only the facts and not the factors, whose behavior is one-dimensional and manipulated. By virtue of the factual repression, the experienced world is the result of a restricted experience, and the positivist cleaning of the mind brings the mind in line with restricted experience (HM, 182).

Given that “operationalism,” this positivist one-dimensional thought, which in “theory and practice, becomes the theory and practice of containment,” has penetrated the thought and language of all aspects of society, is there an escape to this seemingly closed universe (HM, 17)? As a modest dialectician, Marcuse denies while leaving a slight ‘chance’ for an affirmation. On one end, the text is haunted by a spirit of pessimistic entrapment – not only has the logic of instrumental rationality that sustains one-dimensional society infiltrated all levels of society and human interaction, but the resources are vast enough to quickly absorb or militarily “take care of emergency situations”, viz., when a threat to one-dimensional society arises.

On the other end, he says that “it is nothing but a chance,” but a chance nonetheless, that the conditions for a great refusal might arise (HM, 257). Although he argues dialectical thinking is important to challenge capitalist positivism, he recognizes dialectical thinking alone “cannot offer the remedy,” it knows on empirical and conceptual grounds “its own hopelessness,” i.e., it knows “contradictions do not explode by themselves,” that human agency through an “essentially new historical subject” is the only way out (HM, 253, 252). The contingency of this ‘chance’ is dependent on the contingency of the great encounter between the “most advanced consciousness of humanity” and the “most exploited force,” i.e., it is the ‘barbarians’ of the third world to whom this position of possible historical subjectivity is ascribed to (HM, 257). Nonetheless, Marcuse is doing a theoretical diagnosis, not giving us a prescriptive normative approach. The slight moment where a glimpse of prescriptive normativity is invoked, he encourages the continual struggle for the great refusal. This is how I read the final reference to Walter Benjamin, “[critical theory] wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal” (Ibid.). Even if we are hopeless, we must give our life to the great refusal. We must be committed, in Huey Newton’s terms, to “revolutionary suicide”, to foolishly struggling even when no glimpse of hope is to be found, for only in struggling when there is no hope, can the conditions for the possibility of hope arise.

Analysis

There are very few observations in this text to which we can point to as relevant in our context. The central thesis of a comfortable ‘happy consciousness’ which commensurates all classes under a common consumerist culture is a hard sell in a world in which labor has seen its century long fought for gains drawn back over the last 50 years.[ii] Neoliberalism has effectively normalized what William L. Robinson calls the “Wal-Martization of labor,”[iii] i.e., conditions in which work is less unionized, less secure, lower paid, and given less benefits. These conditions, along with the growing polarization of wealth and income, render Marcuse’s analysis of the post-WW2 welfare state impertinent. I lament to say that the most valuable take-away of ODM for revolutionaries today is where it failed, for this failure continues to be quite prevalent amongst many self-proclaimed socialist in the west. This failure, I argue, consist of Marcuse’s equating of capitalist states with socialist experiments.

 Marcuse’s ODM unites the socialist and capitalist parts of the world as two interdependent systems existing within the one-dimensional logic that prioritizes “the means over the end” (HM, 53). For Marcuse, the socialist part of the world has been unable to administer in praxis what it claims to be in theory; there is effectively a “contradiction between theory and facts” (HM, 189). Although this contradiction does not, according to him, “falsify the former,” it nonetheless creates the conditions for a socialism that is not qualitatively different to capitalism (Ibid.). The socialist camp, like capitalism, “exploits the productivity of labor and capital without structural resistance, while considerably reducing working hours and augmenting the comforts of life” (HM, 43). In essence, his argument boils down to 20th century socialism being unable to create a qualitatively new alternative to capitalism, and in this failure, it has replicated, sometimes in forms unique to it, the mechanisms of exploitation and opposition-absorption (through happy consciousness, false needs, military resistance, etc.), that are prevalent in the capitalist system.

There are a few fundamental problems in Marcuse’s equalization, which all stem, I will argue, from his inability to carry dialectical thinking onto his analysis of the socialist camp. In not doing so, Marcuse himself reproduces the positivistic forms of thought which dismember “facts” from the factors which brought them about. Because of this, even if the ‘facts’ in both camps appear the same, claiming that they are so ignores the contextual and historical relations that led to those ‘facts’ appearing similar.

For Marcuse to say that the socialist camp, like the capitalist, was able to recreate the distractingly comfortable forms of life that make for a smoother exploitation of workers, he must ignore the conditions, both present and historical, that allowed this fact to arise. Capitalism was able to achieve this ‘comfortable’ life for its working masses because it spent the last three centuries colonizing the world to ensure that the resources of foreign lands would be disposable to western capital. This process of western capitalist enrichment required the genocide of the native (for its lands), and the enslavement of the African (for its labor) and created the conditions for the 20th century struggle between western capital for dividing up the conquered lands and bodies of the third world. But even with this historical and contextual process of expropriation and exploitation, the fruits of this were not going to the working classes of the western nations because of the generosity of the owning class, regardless of how much they benefited from creating this ‘labor aristocracy.’ Rather, the only reason why this process slightly came to benefit the popular classes in the US was a result of century long labor struggles in the country, most frequently led by communists, socialists, and anarchist within labor unions.

The socialist camp, on the other hand, industrialized their backwards countries in a fraction of the time it took the west, without having to colonize lands, genocide natives, or enslave blacks. On the contrary, regardless of the mistakes that were made, and the unfortunate effects of these, the industrialization process in the socialist camp was inextricably linked to the empowering of the peripheral subjects, whether African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, or Indo-American, that had been under the boot of western colonialism and imperialism for centuries. The ‘third-world’ Marcuse leaves the potential role of historical subjectivity to, was only able to sustain autonomy because of the solidarity and aid – political, military, or economic in kind, it received from the socialist camp. Those who were unable, for various reasons, to establish relations with the socialist camp, replicated, in a neo-colonial fashion, the relations they had with their ‘previous’ metropoles. In fact, history showed that the ‘fall’ of this camp led the countries in the third world that sustained an autonomous position (thanks to the comradely relations they established with the socialist world), to be quickly overturned into subjected servitude to western capital.

By stating that the socialist camp was unable to affect a materialization in praxis of its theory, and as such, that it was not qualitatively different from capitalism (making the equating of the two possible), Marcuse effectively demonstrates his ignorance, willful or not, of the geopolitical situation of the time. Socialism in the 20th century could not create its ideal qualitatively new society while simultaneously defending its revolution from military, economic, and biowarfare attacks coming from the largest imperial powers in the history of humanity. Liberation cannot fully express itself under these conditions, for, the liberation of one is connected to the liberation of all. The communist ideal whereby human relations are based “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” is only realizable under the global totalizing disappearance of all forms of exploitation and oppression. It is idealist and infantile to expect this reality to arise in a world where capitalism exists even at the farthest corner of the earth, even less in a world where the hegemonized form of global relations is capitalistic.

Nonetheless, even Marcuse is forced to admit that the socialist camp was able to create a comfortable life for its working masses. But, unlike Marcuse argues, this comfort in the socialist camp cannot be equated with comfort in the capitalist camp. Not only are the conditions that led to the comfort in each fundamentally different (as just previously examined), but the comfort itself, as a fact, was also radically different. In terms of job security, housing, healthcare, education, childcare, and other forms of government provided social securities, the comfort in the socialist camp was significantly higher than the comfort experienced by the working masses in the welfare social democracies in Europe, and tenfold that of the comfort experienced by the working masses in the US. When to this you add the ability for political participation through worker councils and the party, the prevalent spirit of solidarity that reigned, and the general absence of racism and crime, the foolishness of the equalization is further highlighted. Nonetheless, the comparison must not be made just between the capitalist and socialist camp, but between the conditions before and after the socialist camp achieved socialism. Doing so allows one to historically contextualize the achievements of the socialist camp in terms of creating dignified and freer lives for hundreds of millions of people. For these people, Marcuse’s comments are somewhere between laughable and symbolic of the usual disrespect of western intelligentsia.

Although Marcuse was unable to live long enough to see this, the fall of the socialist camp, and the subsequent ‘shock therapy’ that went with it, not only devastated the countries of the previous socialist camp – drastically rising the rates of poverty, crime, prostitution, inequality, while lowering the standard of living, life expectancy, and the opportunities for political participation – but also the countries of the third world and those of the capitalist camp themselves! With the threat of communism gone, the third world was up for grabs again, and the first world, no longer under the pressure of the alternative that a comfortable working mass in the socialist camp presented, was free to extend the wrath of capital back into its own national popular classes, eroding century long victories in the labor movement and creating the conditions for precarious, unregulated, and more exploitative work.

Works like One-Dimensional Man, which take upon the task of criticizing and equating ‘both sides,’ do the work of one side, i.e., of capitalism, in creating a ‘left’ campaign of de-legitimizing socialist experiments. This process of creating a ‘left’ de-legitimation campaign is central for the legitimation of capital. This text (ODM) is the quintessential example of one of the ways capitalism absorbs its opposition by placing it as a midpoint between it and the real threat of a truly socialist alternative. It is because the idealistic and non-dialectical logic of capital infiltrates these ‘left’ anti-communist theorists that they can condemn and equate socialist experiments with capitalism. If there is a central takeaway from Marcuse’s text, it is to guard ourselves against participating in this left-anticommunism theorizing that prostitutes itself for capital to create the conditions whereby the accidental ‘faults’ of pressured socialist experiments are equated with the systematic contradictions in capitalist countries. In a world racing towards a new cold war, it is the task of socialists in the heart of the empire to fiercely reject and deconstruct the state-department narratives of socialist and non-socialist experiments attempting to establish themselves autonomously outside of the dominion of US imperialism. Acknowledging how Marcuse failed to do this in ODM helps us prevent his mistake.

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy graduate student and assistant at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His specialization is in Marxist philosophy and the history of American socialist thought (esp. early 19th century). He is an editorial board member and co-founder of Midwestern Marx  and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. 

Notes

[i] Reference will be to the following edition: Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. (Beacon Press, 1966).

[ii] Perhaps even longer, for The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 had already began these drawbacks. Nonetheless, 1964 is a bit too early to begin to see its effects, especially for an academic observing from outside the labor movement.

[iii] Robinson, L. William. Latin America and Global Capitalism. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)., p. 23.

The Desire To Get Back To Normal Post-COVID-19 Ignores Black Girls

(Mike Siegel/The Seattle Times)

By Chetachukwu Agwoeme and Christopher M. Wright

In the past year, we have dealt with a global pandemic as well as the violent murders of Black people at the hands of law enforcement. In response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others, activists, and organizers have rallied people to the streets to protest for justice and awareness to the terrorism Black people face in America, and ultimately a call to defund the police. As a result of these protests, there are calls to adopt an ideology of anti-racism. For example, there have been posts of Black squares in “solidarity” with Black Lives on social media, as well as a surge of corporations suddenly advocating for “Black Lives Matter.” Although institutions, including schools, have pledged a commitment to anti-racism, things have not fundamentally changed, specifically for Black girls.

Black girls — who have experienced multiple forms of vanishment, violence, and utter disregard in schools — are now having to face another form of harm in the school building, COVID-19. This crusade to “get back to normal” ignores yet again how harmful our “normal” has been for Black girls in schools. As Black men, we believe it is important to focus on Black girls, because of the multiple forms of violence they face due to their intersecting identities that are overlooked with a “race first” analysis of Blackness.

The desire to get back to normal not only shows how Black girls’ experiences are ignored in what is considered “normal”, but also reveals a lack of attention on how COVID-19 has impacted the Black community. According to the CDC, Black people are 1.1x more likely to catch the virus, 2.9x more likely to be hospitalized by it, and 1.9x more likely to die from it.

The vaccine rollout has also worked to expose inequities in public health. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that in every state in the U.S., Black people are getting vaccinated at rates significantly lower than their white counterparts. The lack of access to the vaccine while schools continue to open presents larger realities of public apathy for Black people by school policy makers. Protection and safety for Black children are not being considered when reopening schools because it was never considered prior to the virus. Therefore, “getting back to normal” as a process means to resume the physical and spiritual violence in the lived experiences of Black girls in schools.

In January of 2021, a Black girl was tased in a high school in Florida by a school resource officer (SRO) in the attempt to break up a fight. In the same week, another Black girl was body slammed head first into the concrete by a school resource officer in a separate Florida school. These examples of violence against Black girls by SROs are unfortunately not new. In 2015, a SRO body slammed a 16-year-old Black girl in a South Carolina high school for refusing to leave the classroom after being accused of classroom disruption by her teacher. In 2019, a 16-year-old Black girl in Chicago was pushed and dragged down a set of stairs by police officers before being punched and shocked with a stun gun multiple times by officers because the girl was accused of being disruptive by her teacher. These instances of violence that have happened pre-and post COVID-19, are not only assaults on the bodies of Black girls, but on their spirits.

Spirit Murdering, a term coined by legal scholar Patricia Williams and expanded to the field of education by Bettina Love, refers to the complete denial of inclusion, protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance —all things a person needs to be human and to be educated—due to systemic forms of racism undergirded by antiblackness. In schools, SROs participate in the systemic, institutionalized, anti-black state-sanctioned violence that damages the souls of Black girls. With SROs as part of the school environment, this extends the prison state, leaving Black students vulnerable to state sanctioned violence under the guise of student safety. SROs are law enforcement officers who are often not trained to work in school contexts. Because of this unfamiliar environment, SROs force the school environment to adapt to the needs of law enforcement, thus opening a learning space to security cameras, metal detectors, and drug-sniffing dogs.

The forms of violence Black girls face in schools are unique because of the intersecting oppressions they face due to their race and gender. In Monique Morris’s “Pushout,” she found Black girls were punished for displays of Black girlhood and overall agency. Things such as falling asleep, standing up for themselves, asking questions, wearing natural hair, wearing “revealing” clothing, and in some cases engaging in traditional teenage angst resulted in their punishment. When Black girls display behaviors typical of all youth, it is viewed as threatening or disruptive by teachers because of the lack of understanding of Blackness or Black girlhood.

Blacks girls get framed as “loud,” “ghetto,” and “thirsty for attention” by teachers and fellow peers, which trivializes the violences they face in schools, thus positioning Black girls as the problem. When framed as “problems,” Black girls are then adultified. The adultification of Black girls is a form of dehumanization rooted in anti-blackness, intentionally meant to rob them from their girlhood — often leaving them unprotected. When robbed of this crucial milestone of growth, Black girls are vulnerable and unequipped to deal with adult forms of punishment at such a young age.

Overall, we need to be critical during this moment of transition, and ask ourselves what are the non-negotiables that must be attended to in order for us to send our Black girls back into schools? What is “antiracist” about getting back to normal? What does this mean when “under normal circumstances” Black girls experience violence in their schools by SROs, teachers, and fellow students? As we’ve mentioned, schools were already enclosures of anti-blackness through their punitive policies and practices. Is the desire to get back to normal worth the sacrifice of Black girls’ safety? This moment is one for deep reflection, reimagining, and organizing around these questions so that we can chart a path of resistance for Black students and their education. With a path toward resistance against this desire for normalcy, we must center Black girls who are often invisible and ignored. While the rest of the world is looking to rebuild the world they knew, Black people must continue to resist the violence that necessitates this rebuilding.

Chetachukwu U. Agwoeme, MA is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh studying Urban Education. Chetachukwu’s scholarship is dedicated to interrogating our current practices around school safety in regards to Black students. Ideally, he wants to change schools (which have been sites of suffering for most minoritized students) to places where students learn how to free themselves and free each other. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Maryland, College Park respectively.

Christopher M. Wright is a PhD student in the Urban Education program at The University of Pittsburgh. His research centers Black spaces as geographic sights of political struggle and worldmaking. He engages patterns of Black displacement and Black organized struggle. Chris holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from The University of Oklahoma.

Learning Marx in the Podcast Era: A Review of “Reading ‘Capital’ with Comrades”

By Peter McLaren

Karl Marx’s Capital is a book that keeps me going, thinking, organizing, writing, teaching; it’s a book that might even keep me alive. The trenchant analysis, the clarity of the exposition, and most importantly the insights that are crucial to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism energize me. It’s a book that radically transformed my own life, one that made me move from working toward “social justice” and within “critical pedagogy” to working toward communism and within “revolutionary critical pedagogy,” a praxis I and comrades have been developing for over two decades now. Reading Capital with Comrades, a new Liberation School podcast series — now available on Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and other platforms — advances that project in significant ways. It’s an amazing offering to not only revolutionary critical pedagogy and education, but the overall struggle to overthrow the capitalist mode of production and institute a new one that is organized for people and the earth, not for the profits. The class series makes the book incredibly accessible but—and this is an important qualifier—without sacrificing any of the richness of the text.

The series consists of 12 episodes that go through each chapter from beginning to end. Derek Ford, a revolutionary Marxist organizer and one of the brightest minds and leading figures in radical educational theory, teaches the entire course. It’s intimate, as if he’s in the room speaking with you. This is no doubt due to the high production quality, with superb audio mixing by Nic de la Riva, editorial direction by Mike Prysner, original music and sounds by Anahedron, and the show’s host and listener advocate, Patricia Gorky. Her introductory remarks to each episode are clarifying and encouraging, and she interjects throughout the episodes with questions that help the listener better grasp the more difficult concepts and their applications.

Peter McLaren

Even though I’ve extensively written about, taught, studied, and discussed the book—along with companions, commentaries, extensions, and debates about it—Reading Capital with Comrades still helped me uncover new ideas and applications in Marx’s magnum opus. This is because the course takes the same standpoint that allowed Marx to write the book in the first place: that of the oppressed and exploited. In the first episode, Ford emphasizes this when discussing the afterword to the 2nd German edition, where Marx insists that “so far as such criticism represents a class, it can only represent the class whose vocation in history is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes—the proletariat.” [1] The standpoint isn’t that of an isolated academic idealist, but a fighter for liberation. As someone who's spent a life in the university, it’s refreshing and rare. In my own academic career, I’ve had to struggle not only against the myriad of “progressive” anti-Marxists but also the armchair Marxists who critique without investigation and action. As Ford observes in episode 8 on technology, Marx approached the Luddite movement with revolutionary optimism. He understood the reasons they attacked machinery and the capitalists producing it, and asserted that experience eventually taught them the correct enemy: the capitalist system. Similarly, being educated in the 1980s I was initially a “critical postmodernist.” It was through befriending Paulo Freire in 1994, learning from Marxists like Paula Allman and Glenn Rikowski, and working with the Bolivarian government, Zapatistas, and various social movements that my own realizations came about.   

The 1990s were a period of intense reaction. In the first episode, Ford cites Brian Becker’s thesis about the break in ideological continuity in the U.S. Becker writes that “The greatest danger to a revolutionary process is not the experience of a political downturn, such as we have experienced during the past decades. In fact, it is not uncommon at all for the working-class movement to experience periods of decline, setback and retreat. If one examines the history of the class struggle, the periods of downturn and reaction are more common than revolutionary advances.” [2] Instead, the main obstacle is the fact “that revolutionary Marxism and the very idea that the working and oppressed classes can take power is no longer prominent in the movement and that many activists and fighters today are no longer familiar with Marxism.” That’s what I’ve dedicated the last decades of my life to, and I’m ecstatic that we’re advancing step by step. When I embraced Marxism, many attacked me for “economic reductionism” or ignoring identities. But even before I was a Marxist I was working against identity-based oppression. What Marxism did was let me see that we can take power and change society. [3]

Overview

This podcast makes an enormous contribution to that task. Let’s be real: Capital is a long and dense book written in specialized and dated language. It’s hard to read. Yet it’s also a lively read once you get past the first few chapters, and Gorky’s supportive introductions really make you feel like you can do it. Both Gorky and Ford remind us, too, that we shouldn’t expect to understand everything. We just keep pushing through. In episodes 2 and 3 we cover these rich but dense chapters with contemporary examples to help us relate it to today. In episode 2 we also get Marx’s first sketch of a possible communist future—a thread Ford weaves throughout the entire class. This sketch is of freely associated laborers working in common and thus, according to a centralized plan. This tension—between freedom and centralization—will return throughout the series. [4]

In episode 4 we move on to the search for surplus-value, which brings us to episode 5 where Mr. Moneybags finds that special commodity of labor-power, special in that its use value is that it produces value and special in that its part of actual people. This is a foundational contradiction of capitalism: it needs labor-power but it can only acquire it through actual people. Episode 6 is all about chapter 10, that glorious exposition on the class struggle. What’s noteworthy here is how Ford attends to the dual function of the state Marx articulates: that it manages inter-class and intra-class conflicts; how the ability to command time is central to the struggle; the way capital transforms and exacerbates slavery and colonialism in capitalism, and the call for such a modest reform at the end. He asks us to keep this in mind for our later episodes. The next episodes, which cover chapters 11-15, show how capitalism comes to stand on its own feet as a mode of production, how the means of production in handicraft and manufacture lag behind the capitalist relations of production, and then how machinery transforms capitalism into a proper mode of production. The key here is that with machinery dead labor rules over living labor and, as such, capital’s dictatorship strengthens. Yet so too does resistance. Class struggle frames the development of technology. Yet we also pay attention to Marx’s articulated historical materialist approach to technology in a footnote, with Ford providing another contemporary example, this time of noise-cancelling headphones.

Episode 9 covers chapters 16-22, where Ford clarifies Marx’s oft-misunderstood definition of productive labor and how it relates to organizing and then transitions from the value of labor-power to its wage forms. In addition to revealing the ideological role that wages play in capitalism–what Ford calls a “wage fetish”–we think through different forms of wages and the distinct functions each form embodies for capitalists and workers in the class struggle. We learn how piece and time wages embody different strategic function and agitational possibilities for both classes before looking briefly on national differences in wages and the relevance this has for analyzing imperialism and international trade.

Episode 10: Reproduction

Episode 10 is on reproduction, chapters 23 and 24, the build-up to Marx’s big look at capitalist production as a whole. What I found most intriguing here was how reproduction lets us see that the reproduction of capital is the reproduction of the class relationship and that the working class—even those unemployed—are still essential to capital. Ford returns us to the definition of productive labor here as an opening to social reproduction theory. And episode 11 is the main event in many ways: the general law of capitalist accumulation, which Ford tells us should be called the general laws, because Marx mentions two: the general law (pursuit of surplus-value) and the absolute general law (the production of unemployment), all while emphasizing these are tendencies or laws that vary. This episode also provides the clearest explanation of the different compositions of capital, and Ford is also intent on showing how Marx includes everyone oppressed and exploited under capitalism as part of the proletarian class, an exposition that clarifies the relationship between anti-colonial and socialist revolutionary projects.

Then we get to the end, the last episode that covers chapters 26-33. Here we get Marx’s critique of the capitalist ideologue’s notion of primitive accumulation and his demonstration that the capitalist mode of production was founded on force: the individual and state-sanctioned thefts of land, the repression (including incarceration, whipping, branding, and execution) of the dispossessed, slavery, and colonialism. Along the way, Marx presents a brief but important summary/overview of the rise of capitalism and the potential rise of socialism, as well as some quick hints about what exactly revolution might entail—and how it relates to the reform proposed in chapter 10. Noting that Marx never relegated this form of accumulation to a bygone era, we go over some examples of how it shows up today and how it continues to be important to capitalism. Finally, Ford proposes that the reason Marx ends with a rather dull examination of a theory of colonialism is because he anticipated capital’s transition into imperialism.

Revolutionary critical pedagogy

Revolutionary critical pedagogy operates from an understanding that the basis of education is political and that spaces need to be created where students can imagine a different world outside of capitalism’s law of value (i.e., social form of labor), where alternatives to capitalism and capitalist institutions can be discussed and debated, and where dialogue can occur. It’s not just about critique, but about imagination and experiencing that we’re more than the skills capital demands, more than the commodity of labor-power. It’s about realizing that we’re not exchangeable. It’s a pedagogical project that can happen in different spaces (classrooms, streets, protests) and times (lunch breaks, classes, when the moon’s visible). It is theoretical and practical, contingent and necessary. [5]

Reading Capital with Comrades is, in my estimation, a manifestation of this pedagogy. It focuses on analysis, imagination, and the daily struggles of the international working class. There are other podcasts and videos and guides out there, but they’re generally academic or lacking a revolutionary perspective. They’re about understanding and analyzing. This podcast is about transformation. It’s about discovering that within capitalism grows the proletarian class that can abolish capitalism and, with it, class society as a whole. It’s organized around a revolutionary perspective, which means it embodies and spreads the belief in the necessity of revolution. Go listen to it today and I guarantee you’ll not only learn something new, but gain new insights on how to apply that new knowledge to the struggles of the day—the tactics, strategies, goals, programs, alliances, slogans, and more. and more importantly, you’ll be motivated to hit the streets. Go over to Liberation School today!

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy (Volume 1: An analysis of capitalist production), trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 25-6.

[2] Brian Becker, “Theory and revolution: Addressing the break in ideological continuity,” Liberation School, September 28, 2016, https://liberationschool.org/theory-and-revolution-addressing-the-break-of-ideological-continuity.

[3] See, for example, Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the pedagogy of revolution (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

[4] See also Derek R. Ford, “Making Marxist pedagogy magical: From critique to imagination, or, how bookkeepers set us free,” Critical Education, 8(9), 1-13.

[5] Marc Pruyn, Curry Malott, and Luis Huerta-Charles, eds. Tracks to infinity, the long road to justice: The Peter McLaren reader, volume II. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2020.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. In 2005, a group of scholars and activists in Northern Mexico established La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica to develop a knowledge of McLaren's work throughout Mexico and to promote projects in critical pedagogy and popular education. On September 15, 2006 the Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.