Beyond Critique

Exploring Critical Social Theories and Education

Bradley A. Levinson, Jacob P. K. Gross, Christopher Hanks, Julia Heimer Dadds, Kafi Kumasi, Joseph Link

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317263180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This book introduces educational practitioners, students, and scholars to the people, concepts, questions, and concerns that make up the field of critical social theory. It guides readers into a lively conversation about how education can and does contribute to reinforcing or challenging relations of domination in the modern era. Written by a group of experienced educators and scholars, in an engaging style, Critical Social Theories and Education introduces and explains the preeminent thinkers and traditions in critical social theory, and discusses the primary strands of educational research and thought that have been informed and influenced by them.

Chapter One Forerunners and Foundation Builders

Origins of a Western Critical Social Theory Tradition

Bradley A. U. Levinson, Jacob P. K. Gross, Joseph Link, and Christopher Hanks

DOI: 10.4324/9781315635828-2

The term “critical theory” did not come into common scholarly usage until the twentieth century was in full swing, and certainly not until after Max Horkheimer’s famous essay of 1937 (see chapter 3). Yet many thinkers whose work informs the critical tradition in important ways are not necessarily considered “critical theorists” per se. Indeed, when we vastly expand our understanding of critical social theory in time and space (as we attempt to do in our final chapter), we may discover a number of important precursors well outside the conventional canon. For now, though, in each of the chapters that follow we will attempt to trace some of the forerunners and foundation builders of the different strands of Western critical social theory. For thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and for the heterogeneous traditions of feminist and critical race theory, intellectual precursors are impressively diverse. Yet even for these strands of theory, and certainly for the Frankfurt School and Jürgen Habermas, we find certain recurring touchstone references for theorizing. In this chapter, then, we identify and explicate key forerunners and foundation builders of nearly all Western critical social theories.

Alone among these thinkers, Karl Marx invites consensus as a “true” critical theorist. Indeed, for many, he alone inaugurates the critical tradition, through his substantive analysis of capitalism as a form of domination, his methodological innovations, and his activism in workers’ movements as a practical expression of his theorizing. Yet in this chapter, we also present the work of the historical sociologist Max Weber, who developed his own highly original theories of social domination, which have been taken up in critical theoretical work.¹ And we introduce the work of a series of sociologists, social psychologists, and philosophers, starting with George Herbert Mead and Alfred Schutz, and moving on to the research traditions of phenomenological sociology, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism that they inspired. While these strands of theory rarely addressed domination per se, they explored and illuminated the microdynamics of social life in a way that later critical theorists took up into their work and found highly useful for understanding domination.

Karl Marx

We have argued that a deep analysis of the structural domination that capitalism begets is one of the common threads that binds most critical social theorists. If our argument is correct, then Marx is certainly the most prominent and influential forerunner in critical social theory. His written work shines a light on the particular forms of domination thought to be inherent in the modern capitalist system.

Marx lived from 1818 to 1883 and worked both as a passionate speaker for the international communist movement and as a prolific writer of economic and social theory, which place nineteenth-century capitalism in a critical historical context. In the twentieth century, governments evoked his name as they implemented a variety of systems that identified themselves as socialist, communist, and sometimes even as Marxist—a term that Marx himself never endorsed. In the twenty-first century, the affiliation of Marx with numerous failed communist economic systems has lessened his stature in some ways, although his specific warnings about the shortcomings of capitalism are now seemingly prescient in an era in which globalization has further disrupted the comfortable “truths” about freedom and material abundance that many had accepted.

It is Marx’s critique of capitalism that makes his writings enduring. In his lengthy three-part work, Capital, Marx argues that the mechanistic processes of buying and selling in capitalism alienate the worker from the creative labor that the worker puts into a product. Further, control of the means of production in a capitalist system almost always aggregates in the hands of a few, leaving the worker without any sense of security or control in the marketplace. Marx’s depiction of the discontent the worker experiences in the capitalist system has inspired other thinkers to explore these processes of economic and social domination more deeply.

Marx's Background

Marx grew up in a middle-class Lutheran family in the Rhineland area of Germany. His father had previously renounced his own Jewish heritage so that the Marx family might enjoy the social and economic advantages of the official German state religion of Lutheranism. Marx’s father had intended for Karl to become a lawyer and had sent him to study at the University of Bonn in 1835. Somewhat against his father’s wishes, Karl ultimately pursued a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin. He established a reputation as a Young Hegelian, a philosopher who embraced some of the historical methodologies of Georg Friedrich Hegel but who rejected Hegel’s belief in idealism, which understood ideas as entities independent of social life. Marx and Young Hegelians argued that philosophy ought to be studied in service to the social realities of the day, and during the 1830s, Marx’s interest in the economic systems of past and present deepened.

The affiliation of the Young Hegelians with left-leaning causes had given Marx the reputation of being a radical. He published his doctoral dissertation outside Berlin to prevent it from being censored. In 1842, Marx edited a radical German newspaper, and indeed the Prussian authorities shut down operation of the newspaper a year later. Marx had also been participating in a secret society called the Communist League, and he developed into a vocal advocate for communist ideas. With the threat of expulsion from Germany looming, Marx left Germany for the more intellectually free atmosphere of Paris. There he met Friedrich Engels, an important colleague and supporter for the remainder of his career. Marx had been moved by Engels’s writings, which detailed Engels’s firsthand contact with exploitation of the working classes by property owners. The Prussian government pressured France into expelling Marx, and he resettled yet again, this time in Belgium. During the widespread European revolutions in 1848, Marx was accused of inciting revolt in Belgium and was expelled back to Germany, where he was tried on similar charges. After being acquitted on the charges in Germany and following a brief stint back in France, Marx settled in 1849 in London, where he would live out the remainder of his life. Marx and Engels had published a pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, at roughly the same time the European revolutions had broken out. Their writings encouraged workers internationally to participate in the transformation of capitalism to a more just economic system.

In London, Marx wrote numerous pamphlets explaining and justifying the Revolutions of 1848 while also working on a major economic treatise, Capital, which would set forth a systematic theory explaining his view on the historical development of capitalism. The pace of his writing slowed considerably in the 1850s, as he devoted much time to the organization of various European communist groups into the First International, a global labor organization that finally convened in 1864. While writing and advocating for organized communist causes, Marx spent two decades finishing Capital. He also wrote extensively on the brief establishment of the communist Paris Commune in 1871. In the last decade of his life, Marx became ill and was generally unable to pursue writing until his death in 1883.

How Marx Saw Human Nature and History

Marx’s analysis of economics was not limited to the capitalist systems of the nineteenth century. Throughout his writings, Marx referred to distinct stages in history, of which capitalism was only one stage. In tribal times, according to Marx, people lived communally in hunter-gatherer societies. Technologies ultimately grew, and the opportunity to exploit their potential for the accumulation of wealth grew likewise. These early human communities formed into ancient civilizations such as Greece and Rome, where part of society depended on the slave labor of the other part to produce food and basic goods. As the ancient societies faded and gave way to feudalism, accumulated wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few people, who would come to dominate the new feudal system. In this society, ownership of land symbolized power and wealth, and most people squatted on the lands of the wealthy in exchange for giving up most of the goods they produced. Then, the development of new technologies transformed the feudal system into a capitalist system. Marx described primitive accumulation, a process in which the new class of owners of productive enterprises in early capitalism consolidated feudal estates into the private property and capital that could support new technologies. One of the most striking features of the early capitalist system was that workers no longer simply performed the necessary labor to produce goods for those who were providing them with shelter and food; rather, workers also labored for extra hours well beyond what would have been necessary to produce mere subsistence goods. These extra hours of labor were now necessary in the capitalist system so that the owner could make profits. Whereas in earlier historical systems, workers could see a direct relationship between their hours of labor and the goods produced for subsistence, capitalism created an arrangement in which workers gave up the surplus value of their labor to enable owners to have enough goods to sell in the marketplace and thereby make profits.

For Marx, then, “sensuous” labor is the touchstone of human dignity, and the technological processes by which human beings meet their material needs constitute the motor of history. In this sense, Marx is a philosophical materialist: ideas follow upon basic material, technological advances, not the other way around, and the material base of a society allows for certain kinds of ideational superstructures. Changes in the basic relationship between technology and labor—the factors of production—drive the broader paradigm shifts in social and economic organization. And because, in Marx’s humanism, meaningful labor is so central to the definition of fulfillment, the denial or exploitation of such labor constitutes the most serious kind of domination (see “Alienation of the Worker” below).

Putting Capitalism in Perspective

Marx’s interest in analyzing capitalism was preceded by a more general interest in philosophy. Like many of his contemporaries, Marx broke from the idealist philosophy that had dominated German thought for many decades. The prominent German philosopher, Hegel, had argued that German history was part of the unfolding of an abstract spirit. This spirit was difficult to fully comprehend, but its influence on history could be detected through contemplation and philosophical reasoning. In Marx’s formative years, he also would have read the more concrete political philosophies of the French Revolution and been influenced by them. Marx rejected the prevailing German emphasis on philosophy as the study of abstract ideas. Rather, for Marx, philosophy could propose ideas that illuminated present social reality. The social reality that pervaded Marx’s world in the nineteenth century was the industrial revolution that was sweeping Europe, and Marx used philosophy to critique the industrial revolution and capitalism.

Whereas liberal political philosophers of Marx’s day emphasized the importance of the individual in modern societies, Marx viewed individualism in capitalist economic systems as illusory, and he argued instead that capitalism was a class-based system. For Marx, only a limited number of people in a capitalist system could own and control the means of production. Capitalism typically bred an elite class of capitalists who controlled the labor power of the workers by hiring and setting wages for them. The worker often viewed such labor wages as a fair opportunity to gain modest material property and establish an independent standing, but, in fact, the elite class held the land, the technology, and the capital to sustain the present class structure indefinitely. Workers had only a slim chance of getting ahead in the capitalist class system since the balance of power was stacked against them.

Marx believed that the capitalist economic system was the base for the legal and political superstructure that surrounded it. In describing the relations of production, he explained that the legal and political systems would always be oriented toward protecting the property of the landowning and capital-controlling classes. For Marx, the modern state arose in the two previous centuries out of necessity. The owners of the means of production needed protection of their interests, and the modern state formed the superstructure to ensure that relations between owners and workers would not be altered.

Alienation of the Worker

According to Marx, the worker was oppressed by a class-based system in which the worker experienced alienation. This alienation could take several forms. In one form of alienation, workers could not utilize or enjoy the products that they made with their own hands. Marx argued that finished products in capitalism had only exchange value: their value was determined as a commodity to be sold in the marketplace. In precapitalist systems, workers had been more likely to find use value in the things they had made with their hands. Marx saw the shift from use value to exchange value as a telling sign of how workers became alienated from the products of their work as feudalism gave way to capitalism. In a capitalist system, most of the items produced by workers get sold as commodities to accumulate capital for property and business owners. The workers see the efforts of their creativity only briefly before the finished product enters the marketplace and makes profit for the owners.

Marx described other types of alienation in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Though labor is fundamental to human fulfillment, Marx argued that the capitalist workplace became a cold, uncaring environment for the worker. He even suggested that the capitalist system of work made the worker similar to an animal. The worker reflects very little in the capitalist workplace, and conscious reflection for Marx is what separates humans from animals. In this way, the worker becomes alienated from his own species-being. Unfortunately, workers become alienated not only from themselves and their workplace but also from each other. The workplace values productivity above all, and workers feel a pressure to compete with their peers in order to demonstrate high productivity. According to Marx, then, alienation is pervasive in its effects on workers in the capitalist system.

False Consciousness and Ideology

Marx indicated, however, that there were factors that could mitigate any discontent that might arise from alienation among the workers. Indeed, the property-owning class was usually successful in using not only the political and legal superstructure but also the cultural sphere to give the workers a sense of satisfaction with their economic arrangements. Religion, domestic home life, and community sociability might all assist the worker in finding a sense of resignation or contentment amid t...