Marxisms and Education

Noah De Lissovoy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138299009
• eBook ISBN: 9781351579377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Beginning from the premise that a range of Marxist theoretical tendencies, or Marxisms, inform recent critical scholarship in education, this volume reaffirms, rearticulates, and interrogates central philosophical and practical commitments in this tradition. Chapters engage important issues confronting the field in the present conjuncture in global capitalism, including the meaning of democratic education, neoliberalism's ideological and material assault on teaching and learning, relationships between race and class in schooling and society, models for critical and emancipatory pedagogy, the implication of education in imperialism and colonialism, and links between education and revolutionary organizations and movements. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive view of the field, this volume presents a diverse set of crucial interventions that take up foundational as well as contemporary developments in Marxist theory and consider their implications for the field of education. The chapters in this book were originally published as journal articles by Taylor and Francis.

Learning by dispossession: democracy promotion and civic engagement in Iraq and the United States

SHAHRZAD MOJAB and SARA CARPENTER

This paper brings together two ongoing research projects on current citizenship learning programs in Iraq and the United States, both of which draw from the theoretical ground of Marxist-feminist perspective. A particular strength of this paper is its comparison between two American citizenship education programs in the context of neoliberalism, war and imperialism. Many claim that citizenship learning is always an ideological project promoting a particular set of beliefs or values. However, this research reveals that citizenship education programs are also ideological in their methods—a process Mojab has termed ‘learning by dispossession’—that serve to abstract learners from material conditions in order to promote a particular vision of liberal democracy that legitimates the very material conditions learners struggle to overcome.

Introduction

Practitioners and theorists of social justice in adult education have long drawn on the notion of democracy as a purpose, outcome and practice of the discipline. In the years following the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, several important questions have been raised about democracy with considerable implications for pedagogy, practice, and theorization of the field. For instance, Ellen Meiksins Wood (2006) and Jean Bricmont (2006) both ask how is it that freedom, democracy, equality and human dignity can seem convincing justifications for war and imperialism. Slavoj Zizek (2002) makes a related point by asking how it is that discussions of inequality and injustice can take place against a ‘prohibition’ on critical thinking about liberal democracy. For adult educators, these questions take aim at the heart of our democratic practice. They call into question not only ideology, but also how it is produced, and the rigor of its methods.

This article brings together Marxist-feminist investigations of two projects on ‘democracy promotion’ and ‘civic engagement’: in Iraq, the US project of ‘democracy promotion’ through networks of women’s NGOs, and in the USA, the expansive volunteerism programme of federal civilian national service known as AmeriCorps. By democracy promotion and civic engagement, we mean active projects by the market, state and civil society to craft and cultivate particular notions of democracy and active citizenship. We draw on different methods, fieldwork and data sets, which will be elaborated in the case studies. However, the projects are united by their use of a theoretical framework, developed by the authors, which seeks to expand the feminist extension of dialectical historical materialism into theorizations of education and learning. In taking up this project, we have three inter-related purposes. A methodological purpose is to advance our understanding of how Marxist-feminist notions of ideology, consciousness and praxis can be used in research. Through these methods, our second purpose is to highlight the conditions of collusion between adult education and neo-liberal imperialist projects for democracy and thus to interrogate the relationship between ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘social justice’. We will do this by developing the concept of ‘learning by dispossession’ in order to illuminate how these ideological relations are elaborated within spaces of adult education. We will begin by triangulating our discussion of the case studies with two important bodies of literature of the field, our understanding of ‘citizen,’ ‘ideology’ and ‘praxis’.

Marxist-feminism guides us to make several assumptions in our theorization of learning. First, we regard learning as a historically specific social phenomenon. By this, we mean that our understanding and explanation of learning includes our theorization of capitalist social relations. This notion of learning is driven by Marx’s articulations of epistemology and ontology, which understand the individual as a conscious human agent participating in particular social relations of production. Consciousness and knowledge are produced by people’s sensuous experience of capitalist social relations. Thus we cannot theorize learning solely as an abstract cognitive phenomenon without attenuating social processes. We try to theorize learning from a dialectical position, meaning that we explore learning as a social phenomenon composed of mutually determining social relations. Learning is then a complex mediation of social experience, struggle and ‘meaning-making.’ In bringing together two projects from disparate local contexts, we will argue that the connection between what is happening in Iraq and the USA goes beyond popular appearances. We base this argument on the assertion that these contexts are particular but realized through the universalism of the present stage of capitalist development, which we conceptualize as ‘imperialism’; this invites an articulation of the current global material reality with immense theoretical and political implications. In recent decades, new terms have been popularized to describe the social and economic conditions of our time such as ‘globalization’ and ‘neo-liberalism’. These are, in our understanding, euphemistic naming in order to ameliorate the harsh sides of ‘capitalism’, its colonialism and, in its highest stage, imperialism. In this study, imperialism is not simply a form of expansionism or domination, which has been practiced by states since ancient times. Imperialism is the stage of the capitalist development, since the late nineteenth century, characterized by the rise of monopolies, the formation of financial capital, export of capital and constant division and re-division of the world into spheres of influence. This stage of capitalism recognizes no borders and engages in war and all forms of violence in order to allow the movement of capital. ‘Neo-liberalism’, in its current use, means the absolute rule of the market, reduction in social spending, vast array of deregulations, privatization and transformation of the idea of ‘public good’ and ‘community’. While ‘globalization’ and ‘neo-liberalism’ conceptualize aspects of imperialism, they conceal its destructive ‘dispossessive’ urge; in much academic writing, the two concepts are used primarily in reductionist ways, focusing on unceasing transformations in culture and communication technologies. The ‘liberal’ component of the term, popular since the 1980s, hides the harsh reality of the last two decades—wars, genocides, crimes against humanity, trafficking of children, rise of new slavery, war on women, resurgence of neo-fascism and fundamentalism, ecocide, growth of the military-industrial complex, increasing poverty, de-industrialization and starvation.

Marxist-feminist critique of citizenship learning

Within the discourse of lifelong learning there are several citizens. The first citizen is the catalyst of history and progress, the everywoman/man, the poor, oppressed and marginalized. It is the hegemonic identity of emancipation within liberal democracy. The second citizen is entrepreneurial, disciplined, hard working and flexible. This person is the realization of the capitalist ethic. There is also a third citizen, who is the racialized, migrating body, stretched across borders and caught between the lines of nationality. This citizen remains the subject of the project of naturalization, integration/assimilation and de/re-skilling. This is not the typology through which educators typically organize their thinking about citizenship and education. Rather, we organize our conceptualizations along the lines of the terrains of citizenship theory (Bosniak 2000, Schugurensky 2006) or political philosophy (Usher et al.1997). These typologies have their uses, but what we want to illuminate is the normative argument behind, or usage of, the category, and thus our educational interventions. By recognizing that we have three citizens we begin to understand the contradictory ways that adult education is involved in the project of ‘democracy promotion’. Thus, our approach is to read them as interrelated social relations.

In the post-socialist, ‘end of history’ political context, citizenship and democracy have re-emerged as central categories of educational theory and practice. John Holst, in his expansive review of adult education and globalization (2007), has argued that the predominant response by adult educators to the collapse of state socialism and the advent of ‘third way’ politics has been to turn towards civil society as the only hope for democracy. Referring to these theorists as ‘civil societerians’ seems an apt description as many adopt Welton’s assertion that civil society is the ‘privileged domain of non-instrumental learning processes’ (1998: 369). Further, Welton’s adaptations of Habermas have had tremendous influence over the ways in which adult educators conceive the nature of democracy and the role of the citizen in the mediation between ‘the system’ and ‘the lifeworld’ as well as the state and civil society. To this end, adult educators have been active in the theorization of social movements and ‘globalization from below’, deliberative democracy, participatory democratic methods and citizenship learning. Similarly, recent calls for a return to the social purpose tradition of adult education have made parallel arguments for the revitalization of democratic learning. Finally, the citizen as agent of democratic transformation has remained a central category of even more radical arguments in adult education that advance the rhetoric of socialism but revert to social democratic theorization (Foley 1999, McLaren 2005, Newman 2006). The ‘civil society’ approach has directed adult educators’ attention away from the state as the institutional apparatus of democracy. Further, although we have been highly critical of the neoliberal reorganization of public policy and its incursion into adult learning, we have neglected to theorize the relationship between civil society and the state in the promotion of democracy. ‘The citizen’ is not only a member of civil society but also a subject of the state as well and, more importantly, an intricate part of the relation between the two.

Of equal importance to our acknowledgement that organizations in civil society engage in their own agendas concerning citizenship learning is the recognition that the cultivation of a particular notion of ‘good citizenship’ and ‘good democracy’ is also a historical project of the state. The state, by which we mean the historically specific social relations of government including juridical, military and ideological components, engages in a politics of citizenship through a variety of mechanisms. The legal status of citizenship, including the boundaries of naturalization, is established by the state. The state also sets the framework for how rights and entitlements will be promoted, protected and afforded. In tandem with these de jure parameters of citizenship, the state also deploys a normative politics through which it promotes de facto discourses of what is means to be a citizen. Cultural projects such as the construction of national identity have real material consequences for those who are named outside the boundaries of the nation. Historical campaigns to craft the citizenry, such as the Americanization programme in the USA, the mission and residential schools programmes across North America, ongoing naturalization work across the Americas and Europe or the Arabization project of Ba’ath’s regime in Iraq are examples of explicit state action in this arena. It is important to recognize that citizenship, as both a legal formation and a cultural notion, is constantly shifting and changing. The boundaries flux and retract and the meanings of membership and participation shift. This is why citizenship and democracy are historically specific notions bound up with larger productive social relations.

Based on a Marxist-feminist reading of citizenship learning, we can see that there is a debate amongst educators about the relation between ideology and citizenship learning. However, this debate is confined to the normative content of curricula and not the category of citizenship itself. Thus, if the content of citizenship education is ideological, we ask how that ideology is organized and reproduced through adult education? What is the relationship between the ideological content and its reproduction? How does adult education become a social practice complicit in the cultivation of the social relations of imperialism, domination and submission?

To engage with this set of questions requires reclaiming a different notion of ideology and praxis than the notion promulgated through critical theory and pedagogy. Adult educators have been highly influenced by the understanding of ideology circulated amongst critical theorists of the Frankfurt School as well as their readings of Antonio Gramsci. Perhaps the most common understanding of ideology was well encapsulated by Stephen Brookfield (2001) when he argued:

Ideologies are hard to detect being embedded in language, social habits, and cultural forms that combine to shape the way we think about the world. They appear as commonsense, as givens, rather than as beliefs that are deliberately skewed to support the interests of a powerful minority. (14)

In support of this notion, Brookfield, in his important attempt to re-insert Marx into critical theorization in adult education, cites a famous passage from The German Ideology (1932/1991) in which Marx and Engels argued that the class of society that rules production also rules the production of ideas. This notion argues that the ideas of a dominant group become the ‘ruling ideas’ of a culture at large and are then embodied in hegemonic cultural notions. Here ideology appears as ideas, thought content and later, discourse. These ‘ideas’ are backed up with both violent, coercive practices and everyday cultural forms.

There is a different way to read this passage from Marx and Engels. Marxist-feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith (1990, 2004) argued that ‘the German Ideologists,’ to whom Marx and Engels refer, were philosophers who ‘represent ideas and concepts as if they were powers in and of themselves, whether external to or appropriated by individuals’ (Smith 2004: 448). Ideology, as argued by Marx and Engels, appears first as the method of reasoning of their contemporaries, not as the normative content of their thought. In fact, most of Marx and Engels’ adversaries in The German Ideology were fellow socialists. It is not their values or purposes that bring on such dispute, it is the methods they use to arrive at their analysis of capitalism and their arguments for political strategy. Ideology is picked apart as a method of reasoning that ‘means interpreting people’s actual life processes as expressing ideas or concepts’ (ibid.). Only after introducing this understanding of ideology do Marx and Engels go on to demonstrate how these epistemologies result in the production of ideas that support the interests of the ruling class and how those ideas are then used to interpret everyday experiences of the social world. This connection between ideas and how they are produced, particularly the general method of academic inquiry taking place within a specific social division of labour, is what is generally lost from our understanding of ideology in adult education. This reification of the concept forgets ideology as an active process, which in turn divorces the very important notion of ideas and power from how they are actually produced and what they represent. Ironically, this is actually a reproduction of the ideological process.

It is important, and helpful, to remember that Marx and Engels referred to ideology, in this methodological sense, as negative. This is not only in the sense that its content is oppressive, but that ideology performs a negative function in knowledge production. In this sense, ideology negates the material and social relations that mutually determine our experience and consciousness; it erases the active human practice that organizes social life and how we think about our life. It erases praxis, the ongoing moment in which how we live, work, think and act mutually determine one another. The revolutionary nature of Marx’s praxis is that it demonstrates ontology and epistemology to be dialectically related to one another and historically specific (Allman 1999). Allman further argued that for Gramsci, the notion of ideology referred in part to the search for the origin of ideas and it is this multi-layered notion of ideology that we bring to the study of democracy promotion by the state and in civil society. We seek to understand not just the normative content of democracy claims, but also how educators engage in a method of teaching and learning that performs the ideological functions of negation and abstraction. The two case studies below explore these issues through an analysis of citizenship learning projects in Iraq and the USA.

Democracy promotion in action

The two case studies elaborated below are distilled from extensive fieldwork on two very complex educational projects. Several years of empirical research have gone into elaborating these phenomena. In what follows, we discuss selective components of these research projects with the purpose of examining ideological social relations through the nature of the institutional imperatives and pedagogical practices embodied within these spaces of learning.

Democracy promotion in Iraq

The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provided an opportunity to study relat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Marxisms and Education—Key Contexts and Questions
• 1 Learning by dispossession: democracy promotion and civic engagement in Iraq and the United States
• 2 Critical Pedagogy and Class Struggle in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization: Notes from History’s Underside
• 3 Porto Alegre as a counter-hegemonic global city: building globalization from below in governance and education
• 4 Economic crisis, accountability, and the state’s coercive assault on public education in the USA
• 5 Between education and the economy: high-stakes testing and the contradictory location of the new middle class
• 6 Globalisation and Its Educational Discontents: neoliberalisation and its impacts on education workers’ rights, pay and conditions
• 7 The Race for Class: Reflections on a Critical Raceclass Theory of Education
• 8 Accumulation of the primitive: the limits of liberalism and the politics of occupy Wall Street
• 9 Pedagogy in Common: Democratic education in the global era
• 10 Jacques Rancière, Education, and the Art of Citizenship
• 11 Defining the political ontology of the classroom: toward a multitudinous education
• 12 Studying like a communist: Affect, the Party, and the educational limits to capitalism
• 13 Neoliberalism in the Academic Borderlands: An On-going Struggle for Equality and Human Rights
• Index