Derek R. Ford’s “Encountering Education:” Bridging Marxist Educational Theory and Practice

By Peter McLaren

It was almost seven years ago that I participated in Derek R. Ford’s dissertation defense at Syracuse University. In that work—later published as Education and the Production of Space—Ford built on my own revolutionary critical pedagogy by further experimenting with the exact educational logics at work in revolutionary struggles and their spatial relations and implications.[1] After many twists and turns, for the last several decades I’ve worked to enlarge the scope of critical pedagogy into social movements because Marxist pedagogy is nothing unless it’s contributing to a social universe outside of capitalist value production.[2] Ford is one of several who continue to take that project in new directions, and since his dissertation he’s continued his work as a communist organizer at the local, national, and global levels and, just as importantly, has continued to write and theorize at the intersections of Marxism, pedagogy, and revolutionary struggles today. His seventh book, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy continues this trend in important and provocative ways.[3] The book is an incisive intervention in the fields of educational and political theory, yet it’s also one that’s relevant to organizers and activists today.

Ford begins by observing the frequency with which Marx’s eleventh Theses on Feuerbach—that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”—is cited. From here he launches into his own intervention by noting that what is rarely mentioned is “the direction toward which he wanted to change it,” something that is inseparable from what he studied and the theory he articulated.[4] In other words, Marxist theory isn’t merely about changing the world but about advancing the class struggle toward the eventual abolition of class society. This is the transformation from the capitalist mode of production to the communist mode of production via socialism, which “as a social formation” is a combination “of elements of both modes of production in which communist relations and means of production are ascending through the class struggle.”[5] The novelty of Ford’s work is the way he sees pedagogical processes as absolutely central to not only the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production but, more importantly, as key yet neglected aspects of the struggle for a new mode of production. Ford contends that we have to both explain the political context of our moment and the pedagogical philosophies of marxist education appropriate to that conjuncture, while insisting that neither are reducible to the other.

An Overview of Ford’s Latest Riffs

The first chapter begins where his last book, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy, left off: with Ford’s unique and bold excavation of two latent pedagogical logics in Marx’s own works.[6] This is a theme he’s developed elsewhere in various ways, and in this sense Encountering Education is another extended riff on this theory. This is not mere repetition, but rather the result of Ford’s sprawling research that refuses to follow a linear trajectory. In this book, it serves as the foundation for the “elements of a marxist pedagogy” that Ford organizes around the “disinterpellative encounter,” a concept first proposed by another former student of mine, Tyson E. Lewis. Whereas Althusser articulated interpellation as the material process through which subjects are inaugurated into the mode of production, Lewis and Ford theorize disinterpellation as the disruption of that process. “The pedagogical encounter,” Ford writes here, “is ‘an exposure to an outside,” and an excess or surplus gap within the lesson.’”[7]

For Ford, Marx’s distinction between the method of presentation and inquiry serves as the starting points for a marxist pedagogical philosophy of learning and studying, the former of which is linear and guided by predetermined ends and the latter of which is open-ended and guided by a ceaseless wondering and wandering to and fro. Ford innovatively reads work by Marx and his commentators as gesturing toward but never reaching this pedagogical dialectic Marx articulates.

The next chapter develops a theory of “errant learning” in which both pedagogies are blocked together, and the political context here are anti-colonial and decolonial struggles. He begins with John Willinsky’s Learning to Divide the World, which looks at how education was and is fundamental to colonialism.[8] Ford attends to Willinsky’s neglect of learning and colonialism while at the same time contributing to revolutionary work on studying that has focused primarily on neoliberalism. He does this through a highly unique—and for some, probably, controversial—turn to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Space and Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres project. Here, Ford identifies “the grasping drive as the educational foundation of the colonizing apparatus. I argue that the grasping drive positions opacity as a potential that must be realized—as a thought that must be known—an orientation that ends up sacrificing opacity as such.”[9] Ford turns to the question of form through Sloterdijk, linking the grasping drive to “lordly imagining,” before drawing out the revolutionary potential of Sloterdijk’s work on foams. He develops his theory of “errant learning” as “another form of dialectically blocking together the methods of inquiry and presentation, but one that shows the necessity of presentation and the existing historical material conditions in which we engage in inquiry.”[10]

After exploring the colonial and imperial context of our times, Ford turns next to the urban coordinates of our struggle and our present. He shows how the grasping drive is the pedagogical logic of today’s urbanism, which he justifies and then develops a pedagogical response to by turning to Jean-François Lyotard’s later work. Indeed, here we will note Ford’s highly unorthodox marxism that, while it’s unapologetically committed to the proletarian class camp and the struggle for communism, looks for philosophical allies everywhere he can, even in the most unsuspecting of places. Today’s urbanism—the megalopolis—is one in which everything is put into circuits of communication and exchange and “is ‘an economy in which everything is taken, nothing received,’” and is thus illiterate. Ford takes illiteracy as a positive element for marxist pedagogy insofar as such illiteracy “is not the negation or suppression of literacy, but instead a development of literacy as grasping, through which forms and concepts constitute objects under the mind’s direction and the subject’s will.”[11] Instead of presenting what this looks like, he inquiries into examples, one of which is the use of “scare quotes.” When we write or read square quotes, we “create a margin around the words and prevent any firm links between the words inside and outside to be drawn. While we can produce uncertain connections (“what is it about ‘this’ word?”), these always slip out of our grasp.”[12]

Urbanism isn’t only about steel and pavement, bounded densities of population and production, but is also virtual and material at the same time. In the fourth chapter, he builds on Curry Malott’s work on the postdigital, which Malott sees as a struggle “over what form the postdigital will take, which will be determined,” Ford urges, “by what mode of production prevails.”[13] While there is much of interest in this chapter, what is perhaps most politically and theoretically important is Ford’s argument against marxist theorists who have abandoned Marx’s theory of value today on the basis that “immaterial” and “knowledge” or “cognitive” work and products are immeasurable. “Marx’s law of value,” he reminds us, “is precisely immeasurable” insofar as both aspects of socially-necessary labor time are “dynamic,” “unpredictable,” and at times even outside of even our individual and collective consciousness.[14] The main problem he identifies with capitalist postdigital pedagogy is “that it limits individuation to the capitalist form of individuality and reinforces our conception and experience of individuality as a finalized starting point rather than an endpoint.”[15] Capital needs the individual subject-form to produce commodities (like knowledge). Yet rather than argue for the collective alone, Ford proposes—in postdigital fashion—for the pedagogical and political process of individuation through incalculable thought.

Ford begins the conclusion by noting that “there’s an immense power that comes from hearing an explanation for one’s oppression and our collective poverty and misery,” but that “explanation is only one part of the marxist pedagogical dialectic. The other part—inquiry—is a different kind of power: the power of wonder.”[16]  Here he summarizes the political and pedagogical distinctions between inquiry and presentation beautifully:

“If one side of the marxist pedagogical dialectic is about knowing and presentation, then we have to attend to the other side, which is about thought and inquiry. Such a distinction turns on the dialectic between exchange-value and use-value, between abstraction and differentialization, between capitalism and communism. The dialectic itself is here, in the present, in the global capitalist world, but in the world in transition. Understanding or knowing involves a determinate judgment that takes place when given data comes under the mind’s order and comprehension is a faculty of determination in which data comes under the mind’s comprehension. Thinking, by contrast, is an exposure to stupor, an experience with immeasurable concepts that the mind can never grasp.”[17]

After an important presentation and study of interpellation, counterinterpellation, and disinterpellation, Ford turns to the role of noise and music in anti-colonial struggles to tie together the various riffs produced in the book, ending with the example of technologies that mediate the voice such as autotune, which show us that vocalization is a ‘process without a subject’ insofar as they prevent us from linking the sound of a voice to an essence of an individual subject or a piece of fixed capital.” These technologies produce a “sonic surplus” that we have to listen to both synchronically and diachronically as well in order to “receive an immersive education in the wonder as well as the theory of class struggle, a struggle that is advanced ideologically and materially through the forces of opposition and swerve.”[18] The swerve is the unpredictable but nonetheless intended action of the marxist pedagogue.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt in my mind that Ford’s book—and this review—will be challenging to some. Yet for those who are confused, I can only urge you to spend time with Encountering Education, which makes these dense and difficult theories accessible and makes them come to life with real-world examples. That the book is available as an affordable paperback and a free online PDF will hopefully contribute to the essential ideas in this book proliferating throughout our movements. The pedagogical elements of the book aren’t recipes or dictates, but rather resources for us to use in all of our revolutionary educational endeavors.

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.

Notes

[1] Derek R. Ford, Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography, and Urban Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017).

[2] Peter McLaren, Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 373.

[3] Derek R. Ford, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy (Madison: Iskra Books, 2022).

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] Ibid., 94.

[6] Derek R. Ford, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

[7] Ford, Encountering Education, 14.

[8] John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

[9] Ford, Encountering Education, 43.

[10] Ibid., 44.

[11] Ibid., 76.

[12] Ibid., 85.

[13] Ibid., 86. See also Curry S. Malott, “Capitalism, Crisis, and Educational Struggle in the Postdigital,” Postdigital Science and Education 1, no. 2 (2019): 371-390.

[14] Ibid., 93.

[15] Ibid., 99-100.

[16] Ibid., 102.

[17] Ibid., 103.

[18] Ibid., 122.

'No Royal Road' to Revolutionary Education

By Patricia Gorky

Liberation School's new book Revolutionary Education is edited by Nino Brown.

Capital was a formidable book from the moment it was published in 1867. In an attempt to make the content more accessible, Capital's first French publisher published the book in multiple pieces.

Karl Marx wrote to the publisher and commended him for the new teaching method used to present Capital. "I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of Das Kapital as a serial," he wrote. "In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else."

The first three chapters, however, had a unique structure that were harder to understand split apart. Despite this tradeoff, Marx approved of the approach since the most important metric for him was whether people would understand his analysis of capitalism.

So as in 1872, so today: Socialism must be understood to be accepted. Socialism is a system where the working class wields control over the productive forces of society, and the economy is planned in a scientific manner according to the needs of the people and planet. Socialism unleashes the potential of the highest creativity and flowering of the working class.

Although the demonization in recent years has faded, socialism remains a badly-misunderstood topic. Teaching, therefore, is a critical skill that socialist organizers can and must hone and master.  Different situations calls for different teaching methods, or pedagogies. How do we know which method to use? How do we improve our own efficacy in presenting information? 

Liberation School's fresh book, Revolutionary Education: Teaching and practice for socialist organizers, explores these questions from the viewpoints of history, theory, and practice. Edited by Nino Brown, the book compiles essays from educators, organizers, and journalists on revolutionary education and socialist educational methods.

Brown explains in his essay on building organizations and developing cadre that organizers have much to learn from the suffering, sacrifices and victories of our comrades in struggle all over the world. "We are all linked by our common oppression under imperialism," he writes. The job of a revolutionary is to help make the revolution. To do that, socialists need to make more revolutionaries.

How do socialists win people over? Socialists are actually in the most favorable moment for socialists in the U.S. in decades. Organizer Walter Smolarek explains that organizers have the opportunity to make connections with working people and build a base of support through different tactics, including provisioning direct services.

Provisioning direct services, commonly referred to as "mutual aid", can be a way to make inroads with communities. Even an inherently nonrevolutionary activity can be used as an opening to bring people into the political struggle for socialism, but the tactic itself cannot be confused with the strategy. When a current approach does not work, organizers must recalculate and find new tactics to reach people.

The goal of Revolutionary Education, after all, is the emancipation of humankind.

Guinea-Bissau's struggle for independence led by the liberator, theorist, and educator Amilcar Cabral is one such example.

Curry Mallot traces the history of how the small west African country became a world leader in decolonial education, in large part due to the leadership of revolutionary Amílcar Cabral. For more than 400 years Guinea-Bissau was a colony of the vicious Portuguese empire, Mallot writes, whose colonial mode of education was "designed to foster a sense of inferiority in the youth." Colonial educators set predetermined outcomes sought to dominate learners by treating them as if they were passive objects.

Militant historian Sónia Vaz Borges, the child of Cape Verdean immigrants, grew up in Portugal. Vaz Borges experienced firsthand the colonial education taught to the African diaspora in the colonial center. In an interview with Breaking the Chains, she recounts how the African community "does not see themselves reflected in official versions of Portuguese history." Political education is not abstract.

Socialists must be able to explain the class character of all events. Organizers know socialist revolution is the only path to survival, yet how do we convince others of its necessity? Revolutionary teaching has to give the person all of the keys needed to be able to interpret events. "Every event has an origin and a process of development," explains Frank González, director of Cuba's Prensa Latina news agency in a 2006 interview with Gloria La Riva.

Television overwhelms us with images, González notes, but the same media denies space to interpret events. The development of social media has only exacerbated these effects. In the end, bourgeois media leaves people with nothing but confusion.

In a separate essay, Mallott explores Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky's ground-breaking work that shows how people's development corresponds to their past and present experiences. Thought emerges from engagement with the concrete world. "While all of us have been shaped by this racist, sexist, capitalist society," Mallott writes, "we never lose the ability to grow, change and think differently."

Intelligence is an attribute but also a social construct. How do you tell children facing hunger, homelessness, and police brutality to be more "gritty", when in fact they already put in tremendous effort to survive? Organizer Jane Cutter in her essay on comradeship emphasizes that all progressive people must be willing to learn from experience and work in collaboration. 

Revolutionary Education closes with two practical appendices for day-to-day organizing. "Formulating study and discussion questions" explains how to break out of a linear mode of education. The sample questions are in and of themselves instructive for the tactics they represent in addition to the thought that they provoke. Learning facts and timelines goes hand-in-hand with discussion with others, reflection on ideas and combining those with our own experiences.

Comprehension questions, for example, help distill dense texts down to their key points. Questions that focus on the identification of significance help people understand why the author themselves highlighted portions as key. For revolutionaries, perhaps the most important types of questions are those that apply and extend our knowledge of the world. How can revolutionary pedagogy sharpen our ability to educate and reach people?

The second appendix covers teaching tactics that can be applied in study groups or classrooms. Some material is best presented in a lecture form, while other situations call for more interactive engagement through having participants draw out concept maps.

How do we best reach people? How do we make sure that our message is getting across? Each situation calls for its own tactics. Revolutionaries must be flexible and adaptable according to the needs of the moment. Learning is an endeavor that requires effort on the part of both participant and teacher.

Marx closes his 1872 letter with an encouragement to work through such difficulties. "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."

Those in the struggle for socialism will find in Revolutionary Education a worthy climbing tool indeed.

Patricia Gorky co-hosted the podcast Reading Capital with Comrades.

The Emergence of Neoliberal Education and Its Deteriorating Effects For the Working Class

[Photo credit: Megan Jelinger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images]

By Yanis Iqbal

Under neoliberal capitalism, the commodification of education has accelerated. Before the establishment of the current accumulation regime, the educational sector was predominantly controlled by an interventionist state, committed to countercyclical macroeconomic management. The labor process of teaching within a state-owned domain followed the general pattern of any other production process. According to Michael Heinrich, such a general form – which is independent of any social determinations – comprises a distinction “among functional activity (labor), the object of labor (which is modified by labor), and the means of labor (the tools with which this process of modification is made possible) as elements of the labor process.”

In the educational setting, labor is the teacher’s intellectual labor-power, the object of labor refers to students, and the means of labor comprises various teaching resources, equipment etc. The state organizes these factors into a particular set of relationships of production. Through the interaction between the elements of the production process, knowledge is generated, which is ultimately crystallized in the new labor power of educated and enculturated students. Thus, as Karl Marx stated, “education produces labor capacity”. Through the production of knowledge-enhanced labor power, the teachers contribute to an increase in labor productivity and facilitate the expansion of capital. In this pedagogical operation, teachers not only aid the reproduction of capital but create surplus-value. David Harvie explains: 

“[T]he exchange value of school, college or university graduates’ labor power (i.e. the wage they can command) may reflect the cost of their education; that is, the value of their educators’ labor power, rather than the value produced by their educators and embodied in the graduates. Yet graduates are, at least potentially, more productive by virtue of their education: by employing these graduates, capital is thereby able to appropriate not only the surplus value produced by them, but also that produced by their teachers.”

As is evident, public education meets certain demands of capitalist development. By skilling and socializing the future labor force, mass homogenous education enables the extensive mobility of personnel which is required under capitalism, in contrast to the feudal era, when people rarely went out of their villages or local areas. In this way, a person is equipped to serve the needs of capital, no matter where s/he is. The mass of working people that is to be educated is dependent on the degree of development of the productive forces. Marx remarked: 

“In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire skill and handiness in a given branch of industry, and become labor-power of a special kind, a special education or training is requisite, and this, on its part, costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or less amount. This amount varies according to the more or less complicated character of the labor-power [emphasis mine]. The expenses of this education (excessively small in the case of ordinary labor-power), enter pro tanto into the total value spent in its production.”

In the post-World War II period, provisions for universal education were made by the state in both the Global North and Global South. For the Global North, the reasons for universalizing education were: a) the need for an educated workforce to promote dynamic economic growth, particularly in science, technology and other white-collar job categories; and b) the threat of communism – represented by the Soviet Union – which forced the Western ruling classes to create a class collaborationist social contract aimed at the fulfillment of workers’ basic needs. For the Global South, the reasons for universalizing education were: a) the need to produce urban pockets of semi-skilled and high-skilled laborers for the smooth execution of import-substitution industrialization; and b) the political dynamics of post-colonial national compacts which required Third World elites to alleviate mass poverty through welfarist methods. 

The promise of universal, state-sponsored education began to wither from the late 1960s. This was caused by the recession that both Global North and South economies faced due to distinct reasons and which forced them to dismantle public education in order to open new opportunities for capitalist expansion. In the Euro-Atlantic world, the economic crisis was the result of a falling rate of profit. According to Edwin N Wolff, the rate of profit decreased by 5.4% from 1966 to 1979 – a downfall precipitated by an increase in the organic composition of capital, and the contradictions of permanent arms economy and growing international competition. In the Global South, the economic crisis was caused by a drop in commodity prices which made the states borrow heavily. To recover, they turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In return for offering short-term credit, the IMF demanded “structural adjustments” – a euphemism for austerity and the destruction of public utilities. 

Disinvestment of state sector equity and privatization of state sector assets, invariably at throwaway prices, put an end to public education. This process symbolized the thorough commodification of education. In the words of Prabhat Patnaik, this means “not only that the labor power of those who are the products of the education system becomes a commodity, but that the education itself that goes into the production of this commodity [knowledge] becomes a commodity. The education system becomes in other words a process for the production of a commodity (the labor power of those who receive education) by means of a commodity (the education they receive).” In other words, education itself becomes a source of profit-making. 

Marx had predicted this when he wrote the following in Volume one of “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy”: 

“That laborer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive laborer, when, in addition to belaboring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.” 

In “Theories of Surplus Value”, he similarly said: 

“[T]he teachers in educational establishments may be mere wage workers for the entrepreneur of the establishment; many such educational factories exist in England. Although in relation to the pupils such teachers are not productive workers, they are productive workers in relation to their employer. He exchanges his capital for their labor power, and through this process enriches himself.”

The privatization of education is not just another tactical decision taken by capital to overcome barriers to surplus-extraction. It represents a qualitatively developed version of capitalism, one in which capital directly produces socially reproductive processes. As Marx elaborated in the “Grundrisse”: 

“The highest development of capital exists when the general conditions of the process of social reproduction are not paid for out of deductions from the social revenue, the state’s taxes—where revenue and not capital appears as the labor fund, and where the worker, although he is a free wage worker like any other, nevertheless stands economically in a different relation—but rather out of capital as capital. This shows the degree to which capital has subjugated all conditions of social reproduction to itself, on one side; and, on the other side, hence, the extent to which social reproductive wealth has become capitalized, and all needs are satisfied through the exchange form; as well as the extent to which the socially posited needs of the individual, i.e. those which he consumes and feels not as a single individual in society, but communally with others— whose mode of consumption is social by the nature of the thing—are likewise not only consumed but also produced through exchange, individual exchange”.

When private accumulation through an expropriation of state assets meets vigorous resistance, public sector activities themselves are cheapened through exploitative methods. In the case of education, the state either lowers labor costs by devaluing the work of teaching or asks teachers to do more with the same or fewer resources. This predictably leads to systematic casualization and forced flexibilization. Budgetary cuts to government institutions lead to problems of underfunding, encouraging the university administration to seek the help of external funders, such as well-resourced corporations. In this way, universities get reconstructed as an educational equivalent of joint-stock companies, subject to the ruthless and coercive logic of competition for research grants and student numbers. 

While in the initial period of neoliberalization the gutting of public education functioned as a conjunctural move to shore up profit rates, over the succeeding years it became structurally tethered to the economic requirements of a reworked productive base. In Northern countries, neoliberalism has led to three developments. First, investments have decreased due to overproduction, weak demand (caused by wage depression) and low profit rates in the productive sectors. Consequently, asset accumulation by speculative means has replaced actual accumulation or productive investment as a route to the increase of wealth, generating a system whose growth is based on financial bubbles and unsustainable explosions of credit/debt. 

Second, given the already high organic composition of capital, new productive investments have relied on automation, thus giving a temporary market advantage to the capitalist who is the first to introduce the technology. This technology allows him/her to squeeze out more value from each worker in a given period of time. But when the labor-saving technology becomes generalized in a sector, the benefits accruing to the capitalist are eliminated since everyone now produces commodities with the same automated labor process. Third, Northern capital has shifted the locus of value creation from the core to the periphery, outsourcing jobs to Third World where wages are very low. In other words, giant multinational monopolies are using differential rates of national exploitation to gain super-profits. 

All in all, the net effect of the aforementioned three changes is to reduce the number of individuals who are needed as trained workers in the Global North and thus, progressively deskill work. This, in turn, eliminates the need for an architecture of public education. In his book “The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame”, David Blacker explains: 

“The situation with production has changed due to its automation and globalization such that proportionately far fewer of the individuals once comprising the working classes of the global North are needed as workers. These people are being cut out of the economic loop altogether through a variety of proximal means: outsourcing, attrition, layoffs etc. They are being “casualized,” which is to say rendered ever-more precarious as forced participants in an increasingly stressful, dangerous, less stable and less remunerative subsistence “informal” economy. The autoworker becomes a service attendant who becomes a street vendor or worse…How much education do these latter really need? How much will elites tax themselves for such “waste”?

In Southern countries, neoliberalism has signified the assassination of the Third World project and the attendant blockage of autocentric development. This has translated into the entrenchment of extroverted economies. Countries rich in natural resources export primary goods to the Global North, and then tend to re-import manufactured products from these same countries. The value added to these manufactured commodities – typically constructed from the primary inputs imported earlier – generates profit for Northern countries while maintaining the Southern countries in a perpetual trade deficit. Other countries have soldered their economic engine to giant multinational corporations who through outsourcing operations and subcontracting chains extend parts of their productive processes to the South in search of abundant and cheap labor. 

The twin processes of primarization and global labor arbitrage have converted the Third World into an impoverished arena of labor-intensive activities such as extractivism, production, processing, and assembly, with export-oriented industrialization never going beyond the production of simple parts in mass quantities. Performing relatively unspecialized operations for multinationals, the jobs of peripheral workers generally feature low wages, high labor intensity, long working hours, and poor working environments. The global tendency toward deskilling, however, has not completely erased skilled labor. Financialization and the revolution in communications and digitalized technology have given rise to elitist and exclusive high-tech education training for high-skilled and knowledge workers. William I. Robinson notes: 

“[W]ork is increasingly polarized between unskilled and low-skilled labor on the farms and in the factories and office and service complexes of the global economy (as well as in the armed and security forces of the global police state), and on the other hand, high skilled technical and knowledge workers. While it is still too early to draw a final conclusion, it is likely that the revolutions just getting underway in nanotechnology, bio-engineering, 3D manufacturing, the Internet of Things, and robotic and machine intelligence—the revolutionary technologies of the immediate future, the so-called fourth industrial revolution—will only heighten this tendency towards bifurcation in the world's workforce between high-skilled tech and knowledge workers and those relegated to Mcjobs, at best, or simply to surplus labor.”

Taking into account the inextricability of neoliberal capitalism and a deregulated-commodified education, any struggle for public education has to strike at the very roots of economic exploitation. If the grotesque wealth inequalities inflicted by neoliberal savagery upon the working masses are allowed to remain, then a proliferation of public institutions providing inexpensive education would result only in the subsidization of upwardly mobile social classes. Therefore, a growth in government spending on education has to be accompanied by a strategy of nationalizations, wealth taxation, capital controls etc. Even then, the sustainable spread of socially progressive and universal education can be ensured only when the decision-making on investment and jobs has been taken out of the hands of the capitalist sector. For all of this to happen, we need to build a radical movement that is willing to abolish capitalism and pave the way toward communist experiments.

The Decarceral Possibilities of Political Education

By John Kamaal Sunjata

We must confront the carceral structures mechanistically embedded in our methods of education. Unfortunately, school as a social formation reflects the deeper, carceral logics animating the racial capitalist state. Therefore, we must take an abolitionist approach to education that subverts its institutional patterning—the acquiescence of our collective will, the subordination of our critical faculties, and the total indoctrination of the masses for the purposes of status-quo reproduction. The current style of education (re)fabricates racial capitalist social relations and extends the racial-coloniality of white supremacy. Part of revolutionary political education then must cultivate an environment wherein educators are not mere fonts of carceral authority, but authoritative fulcrums in the invention of decarcerated learning. The student is not an object where “knowledge” is deposited, rather both the student and educator are subjects in the process of learning. Paulo Friere identified the banking model of education, the one we are most intimately familiar with, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and advocated for what he called the “problem-posing method.” Learning is the process where we gather useful data and construct information in reflective participation and reflexive equilibrium with material reality. Knowledge is the result of this dynamic feedback, a culmination of exertions where we engage our critical faculties and weigh numerous rationales against material reality; material reality itself is an active participant in the process of knowledge-creation. The individualized struggle against the obstacles of intellectualism becomes a shared, collectivized struggle when all concerned parties are partnered together in pitched, dialectical motion as its functionaries.

Education must not be an exercise in the domination of the vulnerable, but an exercise in the liberation of the oppressed. We don’t want to reproduce carceral forms, we want learning environments where freedom flourishes edenistically. The dominant convention supports racial capitalism, racial-colonialism, and white supremacism; the dominant convention is ultimately the state of ordinary and extraordinary oppressions due to the machinations of political economy. If we endeavor to overturn the dominant convention, we must design the learning environments where revolutionaries are created. For education to be a force that produces revolutionaries, we must curate intellectual creativity, curiosity, and critique. Collapsing the relationship of carceral authority that educators hold over students is crucial to creating a shared struggle, and a shared struggle is crucial for mutual respect. As such, mutual respect only springs forth once unjustified hierarchies are directly confronted and vigorously resisted. The natural advantage the educator tends to hold above the student is intellectual experience in the form of crystalized and fluid knowledge. However, despite this, there is still space for shared struggle to occur.

Shared struggle is a necessary and sufficient condition for liberation for, as Chairman Fred Hampton once said, “If [we] dare to struggle, [we] dare to win. If [we] dare not struggle, then…[we] don't deserve to win.” Shared struggle is only possible in the presence of opposition. Opposition always presents a reactionary resistance inversely related to any new sociopolitical currents. Reactionary resistance cannot be overcome without a greater revolutionary opposition or an escalation in the level of shared struggle. So, shared struggle itself is necessary for dramatic ruptures from dominant convention. Protracted relationships of mutual respect transform into relationships of true solidarity. When an educator engages in an abolitionist politic, they will develop true solidarity with their students. When the educator is in true solidarity with their students, their institutional authorities will be utilized to protect the students from the carceral logics of schooling. The educator in democratic consultation with the students will develop ethical and sensible ways to solve interpersonal conflicts without soliciting any part of the carceral state.

An epistemic dialogue is the set of relations dialectically forged between educator–students and student–educators as subjects in learning through the shared struggle within an educational environment, inherited or developed. The communities within the sphere are affected by these dynamics as the subjects engage their material realities based upon new discoveries. True solidarity directly engages everyone with the epistemic dialogue required to collectively transform our material realities. The interactions that take place within the epistemic dialogue can be regarded as epistemic discourses. When we develop our capacities to critically approach epistemic discourses, we are equipping ourselves with tactics and strategies to subvert the dominant convention that defines our current epistemic dialogue. Our capacities are bolstered by sharpening our reflective participation and reflexive equilibrium.

Reflexive equilibrium requires we balance theory against intuitive convictions; develop general principles of ideas alongside their moral judgments, and balance ethical statements with opposing or antagonistic ethical concepts against the moral conceptions undergirding the general principles motivating so-called “common sense.” We must consider the logical corollaries of every decision and anticipate the decisions that our decisions may make. In short, we think, learn, and adjust accordingly through an interactive process.

We must also hone our reflective participation, or our investigation of phenomenon from our experiments and reflecting upon generated insights. Without an abundance of active reflection, in the presence of passive participation, people will default on the side of the dominant capitalist–imperialist paradigm. Counterrevolutionary forces will (re)create what we currently have: a society of pawns. Hence, it is the responsibility of educators and students to prefigure the ecosystem conducive for producing revolutionaries.

Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Higher Education

By Beth Mintz

Republished from Marxist Sociology blog.

I recently published an article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology that uses the “student as customer” to help understand why college is so expensive. I explore three factors that contribute to high costs:  1) contemporary understandings of education as a private, rather than a public, good; 2) the ways that schools are funded; and 3) the “marketization” of higher ed.  These processes produce students who are customers, but it is important to point out that this change is rooted in a set of neoliberal assumptions that frame the way that we think about, organize, and fund education, rather than any fundamental change in young people.

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of this historical moment. It includes a belief in the following:  the efficiency of the free market and the deregulation and privatization of the public sector that markets require; tax reduction; abandoning the welfare state; and replacing the notion of the public good with a personal responsibility for one’s own welfare.  It has informed public policy in every Democratic and Republican administration since the Reagan years, and it currently structures much of our economic and political lives. This includes the university, where it has shaped institutional practice and individual action.

Neoliberal thought considers higher education a financial investment for students, and it assumes that colleges and universities should compete for customers, just like any other sector. These beliefs have laid the foundation for formal higher educational policy and internal institutional procedure. They have not made the academy more efficient, however, but instead have contributed to the runaway expenses that we see today.

In the United States, ideas about the funding of education turn on whether it is considered a public good; that is, whether the whole community benefits from an educated population, or if it is an investment made by the individual, yielding a return in the form of future earnings. In recent years, the latter vision, that of a private good, has gained ascendancy and this has had a profound impact on financing. It helps explain why so much need-based financial aid takes the form of loans rather than grants, and why public colleges and universities are being systematically defunded.

Moreover, although theorists have long argued that schools reproduce the class system, the victory of the neoliberal agenda has intensified the role of education in solidifying advantage. That colleges and universities survive on those who can pay the bills translates into the structural requirement of privileging the affluent, with the needs of many low and middle-income students ignored.  It also has a profound effect on student behavior as education becomes a commodity to be used for competitive advantage in the labor market, turning students into customers to be pursued.

To attract students in a highly competitive environment, colleges and universities invest in all sorts of things to distinguish themselves from other institutions. The way markets work, however, everyone adopts successful practices, and this means that many very expensive innovations eventually become commonplace. This includes the fancy dorms, dining halls and cutting-edge classrooms so common on campuses these days. Indeed, academia has gone on a multi-decade building spree, often financed by long-term borrowing. Between 2002 and 2012, interest payments almost doubled, growing from  $6 billion to $11 billion for four-year (nonprofit) schools. The University of Colorado, for example, owed approximately $1.5 billion in 2019, with 3.6.% of its annual operating budget going towards debt servicing.

Expanded student services are also common recruitment vehicles, and although they do not typically require large capital outlays, they fuel the growth of administrators. Defined narrowly, about 8.4% of spending in private (nonprofit) four-year institutions and 4.9% for comparable publics is on student services. This contributes to the decline in instructional spending as a percentage of total expenses in both the public and private (non-profit) sectors which, in 2017-2018, accounted for 27% and 31%  of four-year schools’ budgets, respectively.  Add to this nearly a half a billion dollars spent on advertising each year, and the role of competition and marketization in tuition escalation becomes clearer.

Among upper middle-class families, prestige has become the centerpiece of college aspirations. When education is viewed as a vehicle for competitive advantage in a labor market – as a private good – and attending a prestigious school is believed to distinguish one from the large pool of competitors, students pursue prestige as a rational strategy for investment maximization.

Colleges and universities understand this well, and, thus, increasing one’s prestige rankings is a central part of many a recruitment strategy.  Indeed, this explains the attention that schools pay to the U. S. New and World Report lists. Attentive institutions have figured out ways to raise their scores and a very common — and expensive – tactic is tuition discounting, where merit scholarships are offered to high achieving customers who would contribute to a school’s selectivity profile. Over time, this practice has spread through academia, so much so that few students now pay full freight. On average, private nonprofits collected  55% of published figures in 2018, with nearly 82% of undergraduates receiving discounts.

Public universities, particularly flagships, use merit aid to recruit academically successful out-of-state students, who contribute to institutional prestige and – theoretically — also counter decreases in state funding by paying higher tuition rates than state residents. But, here again, once everyone has incorporated an innovation, it becomes less effective in distinguishing an institution from its competitors, while the practice remains.  Preliminary research  has found this approach is so pervasive, and the competition so intense, that it may lower total tuition revenue, suggesting that state universities have become particularly vulnerable to the market failure of tuition discounting.

Moreover, merit money privileges the wealthy; it has grown at the expense of need-based scholarships and it goes predominately to upper income students, with awards tending to increase with income levels. This has led to  decreases in the proportion of low income and minority undergraduates in college in general, with public sector schools especially hard hit.

Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of this historical moment, has contributed to the rise of the “student as customer” with costly ramifications. The contemporary view of education as a private-good, for example, justifies the massive underfunding of higher education and helps explain why we are transferring its cost from the community to the individual. Given the belief in the power of the market, the non-profit world now follows the logic of the private sector, with colleges and universities developing institutional practices to help survive marketization and privatization. Dependence on students who can afford to pay the bills explains many of the strategies that have been widely adopted, but instead of providing advantage in the competition for revenue, they have created very expensive necessities. This contributes to skyrocketing tuition, while affecting the class and racial/ethnic composition of contemporary campuses. When compared to the conventional wisdom of trust the market, then, the conclusion is that corporatization and marketization are important drivers in tuition cost escalation.

Beth Mintz is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Vermont.  Her research interests include occupational segregation, corporate structure, gender, and health care.

To read more, see: Beth Mintz. “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology” in The American Journal of Economic and Sociology 2021.

[Image by Kevin Dooley via Flicker (CC BY 2.0)]

Paulo Freire’s Centennial: Political Pedagogy for Revolutionary Organizations

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

All revolutionary processes are educational. From organizing meetings and study groups to writing protest speeches and propaganda before the revolutionary moment to creating new revolutionary educational and cultural institutions and training teachers and specialists after the seizure of power, revolution is educational through and through. Yet exactly what kind of educational operations does revolution entail, and how can we understand and practice them?

It is precisely these questions that Paulo Freire addressed in his classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

One hundred years after his birth in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire’s name is widely recognized and, relatively speaking, so too is his canonical text. Yet the book is referenced or discussed more than it is deeply engaged. This is particularly evident when Freire’s work is severed from its revolutionary Marxist orientation [1].

While it’s often taken as an abstract guide-book for how to teach, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is really a theoretical reflection on his own experiences teaching peasants how to read and write, a theory he extends to revolutionary movements, leadership, and organization. After spending 70 days in prison for “treachery” [teaching poor peasants to read and write], he was exiled from Brazil following the military junta in 1964. He eventually settled in Chile, which is where he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The book has been targeted by the right wing in the U.S. (it is currently banned from public schools in Arizona). It addresses the educational components of revolutionary movements and, as such, it is littered with references to Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and others. Specifically, the book is concerned with how the revolutionary leadership pushes the struggle forward, or how it teaches and learns from the masses in struggle.

The pedagogies of oppression and liberation

The pedagogy of the oppressed has two stages. During the first stage, “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation.” During the second stage, which is after the world of oppression has been transformed, “this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation” [2].

The first stage addresses how the oppressed view and relate to the world. It begins by acknowledging that the oppressed possess both an oppressed consciousness and an oppressor consciousness. The oppressor consciousness is the enemy that needs to be liquidated: “The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal” [3].

This is what capitalism does: it takes everything and makes it into private property, including our ability to labor. This has a profound impact on the world, even instilling the oppressor consciousness in the oppressed. Thus, we have to distinguish an oppressor consciousness from the oppressed person, and we have to transform that consciousness.

The way that we engage in that transformation is absolutely crucial, and this is where the question of pedagogy comes into play. Freire calls the traditional form of pedagogy “banking pedagogy.” In banking pedagogy, the teacher is the one who possesses knowledge and the students are empty containers in which the teacher must deposit knowledge. The more the teacher fills the receptacle, the better teacher she is. The content remains abstract to the student, disconnected from the world, and external to the student’s life. Banking pedagogy—which is what most of us in the U.S. experience—assumes that the oppressed are ignorant and naïve. Further, it treats the oppressed as objects in the same way that capitalism does.

For Freire, education must be rooted in the daily lives and experiences of students, who are subjects rather than objects. The correct educational method for revolutionaries is dialogue, which means something very specific. To truly engage in dialogue means becoming partners with the people. In this situation, “the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” [4]. This process is referred to as conscientização, or coming-to-critical-consciousness.

A decisive element to the location and direction of conscientização is the pedagogical relationship. This relates to Freire’s critique of the banking model of education and to his reconception of the teacher-student relationship. The dialogic model is a relationship between teacher and student, one which is more—but, and this is absolutely crucial, not completely—horizontal. In this schema, “people teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher [5]. The teacher does not relinquish authority or power, as if that was even possible. Instead, the teacher takes responsibility for producing new critical knowledge of reality with the student.

While the pedagogical relationship and process are important parts of Freire’s thought, they have tended to be isolated from Freire’s ideological commitments and have come to stand in for Freire’s entire work. As a graduate student in a fairly critical school of education, I was only assigned the first two chapters of the book, and I’m convinced this is common practice. These chapters are rich; they’re where he denounces banking pedagogy and formulates dialogical pedagogy in response. When we stop here, however, we don’t discover the reason why he bothered writing the book in the first place.

By selectively reading the book, Freire’s dialogic pedagogy is substituted wholesale for his broader conceptual and political work, his vocabularies and theories that generated new understandings of education and revolution. There is nothing inherent in dialogue or dialogic pedagogy that necessarily leads to progressive, critical understandings. For this to happen the content must be placed in a particular context by a teacher. Peter McLaren, one of the few U.S. educational theorists to insist on Freire’s revolutionary commitments (and a comrade of Freire’s), goes so far as to say that “political choices and ideological paths chosen by teachers are the fundamental stuff of Freirean pedagogy” [6]. We can’t divorce the methodology from the ideology, the theory from the method, or the critical from the pedagogy in Freire’s work.

The dangerous fourth chapter

Freire begins the last chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed with “Lenin’s famous statement: ‘Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,’” which Freire rewords to insist that revolutions are achieved neither by verbalism nor by activism “but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed” [7]. It would be just as wrong to claim that reflecting on and helping name oppression is enough for revolution as to claim that activism is enough for revolution. The task of revolutionaries is to engage with our class and our people in true, authentic dialogue, reflection, and action. If we have dialogue and reflection without action, then we are little more than armchair revolutionaries. On the other hand, if we have only action without dialogue and reflection, we have mere activism.

Reflection and action are not divisions of labor between revolutionary leaders and the people, whereby the leaders think and direct and the people are only able to act on their orders. “Revolutionary leaders,” he writes, “do bear the responsibility for coordination and, at times, direction—but leaders who deny praxis to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis” [8]. People and revolutionary leaders act together, building and acting in unity before, during, and after the revolution.

The prerequisite for such leadership is the rejection of the “myth of the ignorance of the people” [9]. Freire acknowledges that revolutionary leaders, “due to their revolutionary consciousness,” have “a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of empirical knowledge held by the people” [10].

The act of dialogue unites lived experience with revolutionary theory so that people understand what causes their lived experience to be as it is. This is a restatement of Lenin’s conviction that spontaneous knowledge of exploitation and oppression must be transformed through the Party into revolutionary consciousness of the relationship of our experience to the relationship of broader social, economic, and political forces at differing scales: within the factory, the city, the state, and the world.

This is a Marxist philosophy of education in that it rests on the presumption of competence. We can see it, for example, when Engels writes that he and Marx “cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes” [11]. We can also see it in What is to be Done? as Lenin argues against economist Marxists, who hold that the working class develops its own revolutionary consciousness spontaneously as a result of daily struggles with the bosses. Lenin argued that spontaneity was only consciousness “in an embryonic form,” and that something more was needed. Spontaneity is necessary but is ultimately limited to “what is ‘at the present time’” [12]. In other words, spontaneity by itself isn’t able to look beyond isolated daily struggles and forward to a new society. Lenin called the spontaneously generated mindset “trade union consciousness.”

Lenin believed that workers were capable of more than trade union consciousness. He actually derided those who insisted on appealing to the “average worker:” “You gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker,’ as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing labor politics and labor organization” (p. 153). He wrote that organizers had actually held workers “back by our silly speeches about what ‘can be understood’ by the masses of the workers” [13]. The economist organizers treated workers as objects rather than subjects. They didn’t believe in the people or their potential.

Freire actually calls on Lenin when he insists revolutionary leadership is open and trusting of the people. “As Lenin pointed out,” he writes, “the more a revolution requires theory, the more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of oppression” [14]. This isn’t a naïve acquiesce but a belief in the power of the masses to become not only agents of revolutionary movements but creators of revolutionary theory through the Party. As Lenin also observed, that the Party creates a particular group of theoreticians: In the Party “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals… must be obliterated” [15].

There is no abstract celebration of “horizontalism” within such a pedagogy. The form of the revolution and its leadership isn’t accorded abstractly; it can be more horizontal or more vertical and triangular, depending on the circumstances. Here, Freire turns to Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution to argue that their historical conditions compelled them to revolt without building widely with the people. Yet the leadership pursued this task immediately after taking power through organization, specifically the party. Tyson Lewis is one of the few to observe that “Freire himself clearly saw his pedagogy as a tool to be used within revolutionary organization to mediate the various relationships between the oppressed and the leaders of resistance” [16]. This is why Freire looked so favorably upon Amílcar Cabral [17].

Uniting politics and pedagogy for revolution

Revolutionary organizers, therefore, are defined not just by the revolutionary ideals they hold or actions they take, but by their humility, patience, and willingness to engage with all exploited and oppressed people. It is not possible for us to “implant” the conviction to fight and struggle in others. Coming-to-critical-consciousness is a delicate and contingent process that can’t be scripted in advance. Still, there are a few general components to it.

First, we have to truly get to know our people, their problems, and their aspirations. This means that we have to actually learn from people, acknowledging that, even if this is their first demonstration, or even if they voted for a democrat in the last election, they actually have something to teach us. The more experiences we learn from the people the richer our theories are and the more connection they can have to the daily realities of workers and oppressed people today. Our class is bursting with creative and intellectual powers that capitalist society doesn’t allow us to express or develop. The revolutionary party is stronger the more it cultivates these powers.

Second, we have to provide opportunities for others to understand their problems in a deeper and wider context, and to push their aspirations forward. Freire gives a concrete and relatable example of this:

“…if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand or they can overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching—but something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people’s attention… The solution lies in synthesis: the leaders must on the one hand identify with the people’s demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a real, concrete, historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive solution” [18].

Through this process, both the people and the revolutionary leadership act together and collectively name the world. Genuine knowledge is produced, and authentic action is taken, and real conviction for the struggle is strengthened.

Freire’s popularity presents an opening to draw many into the struggle and, in particular, the communist struggle. By re-establishing the link between his pedagogy and politics, we can draw those who admire his work into the movement. At the same time, we can better understand, adapt, and practice his pedagogical principles in our day-to-day organizing. “Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders,” Freire writes in the book’s last sentence, “can this [revolutionary] theory be built” [19].

References

[1] This process started with the advent of U.S. “critical pedagogy” in the early 1980s, and Freire’s later work might have played a role in it as well. See Malott, Curry S. (2015).History and education: Engaging the global class war(New York: Peter Lang), 63.
[2] Freire, Paulo. (1970/2011).Pedagogy of the oppressed(New York: Continuum), 54.
[3] Ibid., 58.
[4] Ibid., 80.
[5] Ibid.
[6] McLaren, Peter. (2015).Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education, 6thed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers), 241.
[7] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 125-126.
[8] Ibid., 126.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 134.
[11] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1991). “Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others (circular letter),” trans. P. Ross & B. Ross, inMarx and Engels collected works (vol. 45), ed. S. Gerasimenko, Y.Kalinina, and A. Vladimirova (New York: International Publishers), 408, emphasis added.
[12] Lenin, V.I. (1902/1987). “What is to be done?” inEssential works of Lenin, ed. H.M. Christman (New York: Dover Publications), 67.
[13] Ibid., 156.
[14] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 138.
[15] Lenin, “What is to be done?”, 137.
[16] Lewis, Tyson E. (2012). “Mapping the constellation of educational Marxism(s),”Educational Philosophy and Theory44, no. S1: 98-114.
[17] Malott, Curry. (2021). Amílcar Cabral: Liberator, theorist, and educator,”Liberation School, 20 January. Availablehere.
[18] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 183.
[19] Ibid.

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.

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.

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.