Marxism and Educational Theory

Origins and Issues

Mike Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781138564824
• eBook ISBN: 9781134322596
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

We live in a world where thousands make massive profits out of the labours of others, while those others exist as wage slaves, millions of whom die of starvation and poverty-related illness every year. The fundamental aim of Marxism is the overthrow of the anarchic, exploitative and eco-destructive system of world capitalism and its replacement by world socialism and equality. To build a socialist world is a task of gargantuan proportions, but one that Marxists believe is eminently achievable.

This book addresses some of these challenges from within educational theory. The key theoretical issues addressed are:

utopian socialism

poststructuralism and postmodernism

transmodernism

globalisation, neo-liberalism and environmental destruction

the new imperialism

critical race theory.

Marxism and Educational Theory compellingly and informatively propels the debate forward in the pursuit of that socialist future. In that quest, suggestions are made to connect theoretical issues with the more practical concerns of the school and the classroom.

With a specially written Foreword by Peter McLaren, this timely book will be of interest to academics and students interested in educational theory, the sociology of education, sociology, politics, philosophy and critical theory.

Part I
Origins

2
Socialism and Marxist theory

In this chapter, I begin by outlining some antecedents of utopian socialism, before considering the contributions to socialist theory of three key utopian socialists, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. I then go on to examine Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ critique of utopian socialism, and the Marxist conceptualisation of ‘scientific socialism’.

Introduction

It is a general perception that socialism was born in the nineteenth century in Britain and France. The word was first used publicly in English in 1827 in connection with the Owenite movement (see below); and in French, in 1835, with respect to the Saint-Simonians (Berki, 1975, p. 12) (see below). In a sense, at least in its modern form, this birth-date is accurate. However, the common ownership, cooperation and collective activity that socialism entails are not new to humankind. In fact, as Marx and Engels argued, in very early history most, if not all, societies held common property in the soil and were grouped according to kindred.

The ideas behind socialism have surely been in existence as long as there have been class-based societies.¹ For example, in the Old Testament of the Bible, the prophet, Amos, born in the eighth century BC, showed nothing but contempt for those who ‘lie upon beds of ivory … [and] drink wine in bowls … [and] make the poor of the land to fail’ (Holy Bible, Amos 6 and 8). The future, he felt, lay in a new kind of society where the people would ‘build the waste cities’ from the old perished order, and ‘plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof … [and] make gardens, and eat the fruit of them’ (ibid., Amos 9). In the New Testament, the Apostles ‘had all things common … sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men, as every man had need’ (Holy Bible, The Acts 44–45).²

In the ancient world, slave rebellions were quite common. Probably the most famous is that led by Spartacus against the Roman Empire, which began in 73BC. However, while there was a vain hope to build an ideal city commonwealth, and while a fierce spirit of egalitarian democracy was unleashed, this was not socialism. Whenever those in revolt spoke, it was on behalf of the ‘populus’, by which they meant those who had political rights and the vote – the ‘citizens’ and nothing approaching the majority of the inhabitants (Crick, 1987, p. 2).

In empires that succeeded Rome, such as the Byzantine Empire (AD330–1453), there were similar attacks on the ruling class. In the fourteenth century, there was a major peasants’ revolt in Britain and rebellions in Germany in the sixteenth century (Paczuska, 1986, pp. 9–14).

Not only have there always been insurrections against the ruling class, there have also been visions of how things could be. As Bernard Crick puts it: ‘From the beginning of written records we find evidence of revolts of the poor against the rich, of oppressed peoples against ruling elites, and of dreams of a perfectly just and usually egalitarian human order’ (1987, p. 1). Perhaps the most ambitious attempt at describing how societies could be run in a non-exploitative way is Sir Thomas More’s book, Utopia, published in 1516. The word ‘utopia’ has origins in Greek and Latin and means literally, ‘a place that does not exist’. However, the usual meaning is ‘a place to be desired’ (Hodgson, 1999, p. 4). Running to some 423 pages, Utopia is written as a contrast to England at the time. On an imaginary island, the citizens pool the products of their labour and draw what they need from the common storehouse; and there is peace and security. The people of Utopia, unlike the unhappy English, understand that the scramble for wealth is the source of the problem (MacKenzie, 1967, pp. 21–22). As More argues, through the mouth of a Portuguese explorer, Raphael Hythloday: ‘where possessions are private, where money is the measure of all things, it is hard and almost impossible that the commonwealth should have just government and enjoy prosperity’ (cited in MacKenzie, 1967, p. 21). Negative aspects of More’s utopia include a perception of women as second-class citizens, the presence of slaves and a lack of freedom of movement.

During the English Revolution in the 1640s, the ‘Levellers’ and the ‘Diggers’ both presented threats to the gentry. By 1648, the rank-and-file of the parliamentary armies had swung over to support the Levellers, who sought to carry the new democratic ideas to their logical conclusion, and to attack all forms of privilege. While they concentrated on political reform, there is an inherent socialism (albeit a nationalistic socialism) implicit in their doctrine. As MacKenzie (1967, p. 23) states: ‘they found their golden age in Saxon England, before the Norman Conquest had placed a privileged and alien hierarchy in power and driven its rightful owners from their communal enjoyment of the soil of England’ The leader of the Diggers movement, Gerrard Winstanley, actually anticipated modern socialist ideas in his book, Law of Freedom (1652) which advocated agrarian communism (Cole, 1971, p. 9):

The earth is to be planted, and the fruits reaped and carried into barns and store-houses, by the assistance of every family. And if any man or family want corn or other provision they may go to the store-houses and fetch without money …. If any want food or victuals, they may either go to the butchers’ shops, and receive what they want without money; or else go to the flocks of sheep or herds of cattle, and take and kill what meat is needful for their families, without buying and selling. And the reason why all the riches of the earth are a common stock is this, because the earth, and the labours thereupon, are managed by common assistance of every family, without buying and selling.

(Winstanley, 1652)

Utopian socialism

My aim in this chapter, however, is not to recount in detail these historical struggles and imagined utopias, but rather to examine, with particular respect to their contribution to Marxism, the ideas of three prominent modern utopian socialists, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen.

It is not until the eighteenth century that there begin ideas of cumulative social change. Prior to that, the belief was that the future would resemble the past. As Crick (1987, p. 3) puts it:

One regime was good, another bad, life was happy or unfortunate; our children’s generation may be more fortunate than ours, but the next might swing back again. Cyclical theories were common, the wheel of fortune kept on turning on a fixed axis.

Henri de Saint-Simon

Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) was not yet 30 when the French Revolution (1789–1799) began. This revolution was, of course, a bourgeois or middle-class revolution. An impoverished aristocrat turned commoner, Saint-Simon assumed the name ‘Citoyan Bonhomme’, and took part in revolutionary events, on the side of the revolution (Berki, 1975, pp. 43–44). For Saint-Simon, the antagonism was between ‘industrial forces’ (defined as manufacturers, merchants and bankers, as well as wage-workers) and ‘idlers’ (defined as the old aristocracy who took no part in production or distribution but merely lived off others):

Man is lazy by nature …. He only works, therefore, according to his needs and desires …. But there is surrounding society … a throng of parasites who, although they have the same needs and desires as the others, have not been able to overcome the natural laziness common to all men, and who, although they produce nothing, consume or seek to consume as though they did produce. These men use force to live off the work of the rest, either off what they are given or what they can take. In short, they are idlers, that is, thieves.

(Saint-Simon, 1817)

The liberation of humanity was to come about when the bourgeoisie (manufacturers, merchants and bankers) transformed themselves into ‘public officials’ who, holding a commanding and economically privileged position vis-à-vis the working class, would pave the way forward for this liberation. The bankers especially were to be central in this:

Thus, the industrials can and should be considered as having an organisation and forming a corporation: And in fact all the farmers and other manufacturers are linked together by the class of merchants; and all the merchants have their own common agents in the bankers; so that the bankers can and should be considered as the general agents of industry …. In this situation the chief banking houses of Paris are called upon to direct the political action of the industrials.

(Saint-Simon, 1975 [1817], p. 212)

Saint-Simon believed that ‘all men ought to work’ (Engels, 1977 [1892], p. 399), and that the state had an obligation to find work for all its citizens, who, in turn, were obliged to work for the common good. Saint-Simon’s favoured society was not intended to be democratic or egalitarian. Wages would be allotted to each, according to their respective contributions to that common good (Crick, 1987, p. 33). Later in life, Saint-Simon sought to combat the selfishness in the spirit of the age, by what he referred to as ‘New Christianity’, linking together the scientists, artists and industrialists to make them ‘the managing directors of the human race’ (Saint-Simon, cited in Berki, p. 45). The aim of ‘New Christianity’ was the well-being of the poor.

While Saint-Simon’s ‘New Christianity’ was ‘rigidly hierarchic’ (Engels, 1977 [1892], p. 399), he was adamant that:

The new Christian organisation will base both temporal and spiritual institutions on that principle that all men should treat one another as brothers. It will direct all institutions, whatever their nature, towards increasing the … moral and physical condition of the poorest class [emphasis original].

(Saint-Simon, 1975 [1817], pp. 291, 303)

Elsewhere, Saint-Simon also referred to the promotion of ‘the moral, intellectual and physical improvement of poorest and most numerous classes’ (cited in Crick, 1987, p. 32; my emphasis).

Saint-Simon’s vision was thus of a state of harmony between capital and labour: an elitist vision of a centralised and planned industrial society administered for the common good and looking to the future. As Crick (1987, p. 33) points out, it is ‘a picture of a capitalist society without a free-market [and] with a collective capacity to organise and steer the economy for the common good’. Like Marxism, the theory underlying Saint-Simon’s utopia is of stages of human development. However, these stages are not related to class struggle as in Marxism, but rather to advances in knowledge. For Saint-Simon, economic change was the outcome of scientific discovery. The roots of human progress are in the advance of knowledge. Accordingly, it is the great discoverers who are the supreme makers of history (Cole, 1971, p. 49) rather than the oppressed masses as in Marxism:

The improvement of scientific theory was Descarte’s chief concern …. For the sake of scientific progress, the happiness of humanity, and the glory of the French nation, the Institute [of France] [previously the French Academies] must work to improve theory. It must resume the approach of Descartes.

(Saint-Simon, 1975 [1817], p. 86)

What is of greatest significance in Saint-Simon’s thoughts for the subsequent development of Marxism is his recognition of class struggle but, in his case, the bourgeois struggle against the aristocracy. Thus Saint-Simon writes of the ‘struggle between the King and the great vassals, between the chiefs of industrial enterprises and the nobles … the direct action of the industrials against the nobles’ (Saint-Simon, 1975 [1817], p. 246). He also refers to ‘the two classes [that] existed in the nation … before the … industrials … those who commanded and those who obeyed’ (Saint-Simon, 1975 [1817], p. 247). As Engels (1977 [1892], pp. 399–400) notes, to recognise the French Revolution as a class war was ‘a most pregnant discovery’.

Charles Fourier

Born to a middle-class merchant family which lost most of its possessions during the French Revolution, François-Marie-Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was particularly scathing about the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie after the revolution...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Origins
• Part II Issues
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index