Marxism, Neoliberalism, and Intelligent Capitalism

An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader, Volume XII

Liz Jackson, Michael A. Peters, Liz Jackson, Michael A. Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032140193
• eBook ISBN: 9781000509052
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores Marxism and related political-economic theory, and its implications for education around the world, as seen in the history of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. As such, it illustrates the evolution of political-economic changes across societies, as they have been brought to bear within the academic field and in the journal, through the exploration of typical and noteworthy articles examining political-economic themes over time.

In the early decades of Educational Philosophy and Theory, only a few works can be found focused on Marx's work, Marxism, and related themes. However, since the mid-1990s, Educational Philosophy and Theory has published many articles focused on neoliberalism and educational responses to theories and policies based on political-economic perspectives. This collection serves to showcase this work, exploring the way Marxist, neoliberal and other related political-economic theories have been applied to educational discussions among philosophers and theorists of education in the history of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

As a collection, this book provides a glimpse of a dramatically changing world, and changing scholarly responses to it, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This collection can therefore be useful to scholars interested in better understanding how changes to the political economy have intersected with those in education over time, as well as the diverse ways scholars have approached and reacted to a shifting landscape, considering views ranging from Marxist to Post-Marxist, to neoliberal, and beyond.

Chapter 1

Can Dewey be Marx’s educational-philosophical representative?

Helen Freeman and Alison Jones

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231967-2

Some recent critiques of the meaning and effectiveness of liberal educational policy in the United States in this century have been heavily influenced by the work of Karl Marx although this lacks, as Herbert Gintis has stated, any explicit philosophical theory of education.¹ Given John Dewey’s representativeness of liberal socio-educational philosophy, neo-marxist ‘exposures’ of the ‘real functions’ of schooling under capitalism may tend to be seen (illogically) as refutations of Dewey’s relevance to the search for a marxist philosophy of education. It may be, as Sidney Hook once stated,² that Dewey’s educational theory properly demands a socialist democracy for its general adoption and viability. Rather than assume, therefore, any necessary basic conflict between Dewey and Marx, this essay will attempt an exploration of their compatibility,³ conducted through these stages: first, an examination of the grounds for Dewey’s rejection of the marxism of the 1930s; second, a comparison of some philosophical views of Dewey and Marx, viz., conceptions of community, humanness, and the nature of knowledge; third, an inspection of Marx’s few statements of educational principle and a demonstration of their elaborated presentation in Dewey’s idea of occupations in the elementary school curriculum. My exposition is meant to suggest that Dewey may largely provide an ‘openly’ interpreted marxism with the normative philosophy of education which it does not explicitly contain.

I

John Dewey was vehemently opposed to ‘the logic of general notions’ in social theory, i.e., the mode of reasoning marked by the use of reified or hypostatic concepts.⁴ To speak of ‘the individual’ or ‘the state’ or ‘society’ as an abstract but active entity and thus ignore its empirical specificities or to speak of the ‘essential characteristics’ pertaining to such concepts, was tantamount to metaphysical mystification. The logic of general notions prevented social inquiry and experimentation, which demand operational concepts and assume the provisional nature of knowledge. Such a logic, instead, preempted investigation by dictating in advance what must be the case. Empirical observations, which could not be made to lie down in the Procrustean bed of general notions, were explained away. Contingency, ambiguity, or novelty were brushed aside in the quest for certainty.

While pointing to certain similarities between Dewey and Marx, George Raymond Geiger has argued that

Dewey’s refusal to follow the philosophy of Marx (and, presumably, to accept the term socialist or communist) is, as might easily be expected, the refusal to accept metaphysical explanation for social and political problems. The Marxian dialectic, the class struggle, the labour theory of value – these are as abstract and, for Dewey, as essentially meaningless as any of the Hegelianisms or economic classicisms from which they derive.⁵

In the mid-1930’s, Dewey entered a debate, initiated by Theodore Brameld, on the directive value to educators of the marxist concept of class struggle.⁶ Dewey succinctly and clearly summarized ‘the position of communists of the current Marxist-Leninist type’ and remarked it was ‘clear-cut and simple’. He rejected adoption of the concept, even if empirically valid, as the source of educational policy, on these grounds: (a) that by itself, it was insufficient to provide practical guidance; those who believed that recognition of class struggle was enough to indicate policy

seem to convert a just plea that educators should become aware of the existence of social injustice, oppression, and disorder into the idea that this recognition suffices of itself to determine educational policies and methods … such recognition forms a significant part of the problem of education, but it does not provide a key to its solution.⁷

(b) That instead of being a classificatory tool for social analysis, ‘the class concept is a strictly realistic apprehension of the existing social reality and of that which will exist’, i.e., a reified concept; (c) that the concept of democracy was more appropriate, in the American context, as ‘the frame of reference and the source of directive ideas of educational action’ since it permitted consideration of a comprehensive social interest.⁸ Two years later, in reviewing Leon Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours, Dewey again rejected the historical teleology of marxism implicit in its belief in the inevitability of class struggle and the revolutionary outcome of it in the establishment of socialism. He equated this marxism with ‘orthodox religionism and traditional idealism’ and supposed its determinism to be an Hegelian inheritance.⁹

As a seminal, incomplete and inconsistent body of work, classical marxism has lent itself to several interpretations in response to the political uses made of it. Dewey, among many, rightly condemned ‘deterministic marxism’. Marx’s theory of social structure and dynamics, commonly known through Engels as ‘historical materialism’, was considered to have uncovered the ‘iron laws’ of a new ‘science of society’, even at times by Marx himself. This claim accorded with the scientific-technological spirit of the age. The triumph of socialism following the disintegration of capitalism through explosive class conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat was ineluctably assured. This version of historical materialism, held by the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (e.g., Karl Kautsky), the Russian school of Plekhanov, and the Bolshevik theoretician Bukharin, became institutionalized dogma under Stalin and through his control of the Third International, in official communist parties of capitalist nations. This received version of marxism, now often called ‘vulgar’ or ‘mechanistic’ marxism, ignored the need for critical social analysis and downplayed autonomous human will in the politics of revolutionary change. Under Soviet hegemony, Western marxism remained deterministic until it came under noticeable attack from ‘humanistic’ and ‘cultural’ revisionists by the mid-1950s. Through the ‘discovery’ or Marx’s early writings, e.g., Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the first group emphasized the self-constitutive nature of the human species while the latter, developing Antonio Gramsci’s reading of Marx’s work, drew attention to the ways in which ‘ideology’, as the popular world view of ‘alienated consciousness’, may make the course of social change highly problematic.

Shed of its scientistic claims of predictive certainty, Marx’s social model of economic ‘base’ and civil-political-ideological ‘superstructure’ is highly suggestive for the generation of hypotheses for molar inquiry. In marxist social theory, moreover, the meaning of the functions of an institution is not completely given through the workings of the institution itself. The ‘nature’ of institutional processes is also (dialectically) understood through the conditions necessary for its existence. However, while Marx’s social model is in this way illuminating, it provides few opportunities for comprehending intra-institutional dynamics where knowledge is obviously most important if people are to re-create the conditions of their existence with critically informed freedom. Denis Gleeson has given an educational illustration of this point:

while the Marxist critique of the relations between schooling and capitalism asks us, with justification, to re-examine the over-all objectives of education, it fails to address the nitty-gritty issues of everyday school practice and thus ignores the possible strategies of intervention at the grass-roots level.¹⁰

The failure of marxist theory to address itself to internal institutional processes often leads to explanations where general notions (‘capitalism’, ‘the bourgeoisie’, ‘the economic base’, ‘the social relations of production’, etc.) perform the illicit modes of reasoning castigated by Dewey and the ‘humanistic’ Marx.

Dewey’s rejection of general notions and his preference for operational concepts restricted the development of a theory of social structure and change of comparable sweep to Marx’s. Dewey generally refused to conceptualize ‘society’ in dimensions larger than small-scale groups. He confessed his bewilderment when ‘society’ was spoken of ‘in large and vague ways’. He wrote:

I often wonder what meaning is given to the term “society” by those who oppose it to the intimacies of personal intercourse, such as those of friendship. Presumably they have in their minds a picture of rigid institutions or some set and external organization. But an institution that is other than the structure of human contact and intercourse is a fossil of some past society; organization, as in any living organism, is the co-operative consensus of multitudes of cells, each living in exchange with others.¹¹

Even when Dewey recommended that ‘We should forget “society” and think of law, industry, religion, medicine, politics, art, education, philosophy – and think of them in the plural’,¹² there is no indication how these activities, separately identifiable, might be structurally and dynamically interrelated.

When Dewey urged a renascent liberalism to view progress as ‘increments of present meaning’, his implicitly operative concept of society demanded that the increases must be small, arrived at painstakingly, and accomplished as ends-in-view, but also that the framework for progress must be ‘a unique and localized situation’.¹³ Dewey’s pluralistic view of society, however, was not only a consequence of his hostility to the logic of general notions and ‘block-universe theories of social causation’. It was also a necessary implication of the experimental method of inquiry borrowed from the natural sciences without a sufficiently sensitive appreciation of the difficulties of its application to the domains of human social life.¹⁴ Dewey wrote that:

Scientific method would teach us to break up, to inquire definitely and with particularity, to seek solutions in the terms of concrete problems as they arise … Wholesale creeds and all-inclusive ideals are impotent in the face of actual situations; for doing always means the doing of something in particular.¹⁵¹⁶

Just as there are multiplicit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• Foreword Page
• Introduction: Marxism, neoliberalism and beyond in educational philosophy and theory
• 1 Can Dewey be Marx’s educational-philosophical representative?
• 2 Radical defeatism
• 3 State education service or prisoner’s dilemma: the ‘hidden hand’ as source of education policy
• 4 Neo-liberal education policy and the ideology of choice
• 5 Neo-liberalism and hegemony revisited
• 6 The restructuring of China’s higher education: an experience for market economy and knowledge economy
• 7 Art and creativity in the global economies of education
• 8 Implications of the My School website for disadvantaged communities: a Bourdieuian analysis
• 9 The incompatibility of neoliberal university structures and interdisciplinary knowledge: a feminist slow scholarship critique
• 10 Women, capitalism and education: on the pedagogical implications of postfeminism
• 11 ‘Intelligent capitalism’ and the disappearance of labour: whitherto education?
• Index