Mass Education, Global Capital, and the World

The Theoretical Lenses of István Mészáros and Immanuel Wallerstein

T. Griffiths, R. Imre

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137014818
• eBook ISBN: 9781137014825
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Education Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By presenting a series of intricate analyses of educational phenomena through the theoretical lenses offered by Immanuel Wallerstein and István Mészáros, the book engages readers and helps them to critically analyze their own participation in the global economy, as citizens, policy-makers, and academics or teachers.

Chapter 1

Wallerstein and Mészáros: Scholars for the Twenty-First Century

That the world confronts a series of contemporary crises—whether focused in the political, social, cultural, or economic realms—is surely a given. Žižek (2010, 86–87) has suggested that we have moved into a situation of “permanent economic emergency” that is becoming “a constant, a way of life” with the ever-present threat of “far more savage austerity measures, cuts in benefits, diminishing health and education services and more precarious employment.” Perhaps this has always been the case, or at least it has been the case for decades or centuries, depending on the criteria used to make such characterisations.

Similarly we see a wide, and seemingly endless, array of responses to these global crises. At the time of writing, these include mass mobilizations and protests in Turkey that, according to some reports from the ground, are transcending long-established divisions between ethnic and religious groups, and those associated with different Leftist political currents and parties, toward some sort of anti-systemic movement.¹ Not long ago, the global “Occupy” movement, with variants like los indignados in Spain, advanced similar goals.

Of course the list of such movements is long, and in recent years is coupled with dramatic effects such as those witnessed in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, and other significant protests grouped under the banner of the Arab Spring. This volume does not set out to provide a review of these movements, and nor will it offer any sort of systematic evaluation of their impact. Such work is important for all those with an interest in interpreting their causes, processes, trajectories, and wider implications, but it is not the object of our analysis here. Rather, we cite these high profile examples as indicative of a general climate, which of course varies dramatically across geographical and political contexts; it can be read as qualitatively different from historical cycles (expansion and recession) and so, may be interpreted as constituting something new and distinctive.

We begin from this very broad perspective, which has been a premise of the work of the two scholars whose work we are considering and seeking to apply to educational thinking. In what follows, we set out their substantial arguments in favor of such a view, each argument elaborating the case that global capitalism, or the ‘capitalist world-system,’ in Wallerstein’s nomenclature, is approaching and/or has reached a set of absolute limits whose resolution requires an alternative, noncapitalist, socioeconomic, and political framework.

As in any case of scholarship, one question confronting the authors is how far back in the line of reasoning one needs to go to justify, or at least to substantiate, the arguments being presented. One of the authors has clearly adopted a partisan use of Wallerstein’s work (e.g., Griffiths: 2009a; 2011a, Griffiths and Knezevic: 2009), and so views this project explicitly as a way to further disseminate Wallerstein’s work, to debate its merits, and to consider its utility in comparative and international educational research. Wallerstein’s argument that we are engaged in a period of systemic transition from a capitalist to an uncertain replacement system is thus elaborated in some detail, as an explicit intervention advocating this reading of social reality.

This book’s approach is to both introduce new readers to his world-systems analysis and to set the ground for its application to educational questions. Moreover, it is done in the interest of presenting to the reader a comprehensive framework for navigating and acting in contemporary conditions. As we note throughout the volume, Wallerstein’s perspective puts forward a reading of contemporary and historical social reality, and more limited strategizing for the future, the latter consistently done in highly qualified terms with respect to the uncertainty of future developments, and in the spirit of generating broad alliances. A result is provisional or conditional programatic claims that might constitute a qualitatively different anti-systemic movement.

Similarly, Mészáros’ approach is also critical of current perspectives on the global system. For Mészáros, the grounding for current problems exists in the inception of the industrial revolution and the eventuating global totality of that change. This historical process, and indeed the global nature of that process, is the core of his analysis throughout his work. For Mészáros, the main change in the capitalist system as a proper global structure is not even that it is ‘capitalist’ in the sense of a ‘free market’ that controls the relations of production, but that capital itself—that is to say, an overarching financial structure—creates and limits our world. This is the hegemony of capital for Mészáros.

Our underlying argument here is that by virtue of the nature and substance of their work over four or five decades, the time for renewed consideration of their work is ripe. If we accept that the globe faces dilemmas that are, in some respects, unprecedented, the most obvious candidate being global warming and the risks of irreversible climatic damage, then the work of Wallerstein and Mészáros makes a vital contribution to our understanding of contemporary conditions, and on this basis, to considering how to respond to these conditions within our particular fields of work. In this sense, we concur with Wallerstein’s (1999b) assertion that world-systems analysis’ time has come, noting that what once constituted his most controversial claims are now frequently accepted as givens, as part of the landscape in which we operate.

For example, and crucially for this volume, he argues that the anti-systemic character of socialist political parties and movements morphed, in historical practice, to a particular political strategy and pathway for achieving national economic growth and development within the constraints of the world-economy. From the perspective of 2013 such a position seems quite mild or mainstream.

Similarly, for Mészáros, the development of political parties guarantees the continuation of capitalism and its attenuated problematics. For some decades, the debate between ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ was a main discussion among socialists in various parts of the world. For Mészáros, this issue represented his break with the Budapest School in that he sought to remain firmly in the structural Marxist camp, whereas the Budapest School sought a reformist agenda. Mészáros believed that only one way remained to do away with the exploitative nature of capitalism: to achieve a political solution of self-government. Thus, reforms to political and economic systems that sought to redistribute surplus value could never be enough unless the actual labor performed by people was democratized. This is made more complex by the fact that we are talking about ‘reform Marxism’ in realized (or so-called real-existing) socialism, rather than what eventually became the ‘third way’ blending of socialism and capitalism within advanced liberal democracies. The challenge for Mészáros was to remain Marxist, decry Stalinism, and continue to share the humanist Marxism of the Budapest School.

The relevance of these scholars to contemporary times is evident in the attention given to them and their work in some key parts of the contemporary world. For example, the late president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, as one of the high-profile leaders of the movement to develop and enact a model of ‘twenty-first century socialism’ in Venezuela and the region, designated Mézsáros the ‘socialist pathfinder’ of our times.² Some of Mészáros’ work was translated into Spanish and distributed at nominal cost, or in the case of Social Structure and the Forms of Consciousness, published and distributed free of charge by the presidential office.

While less prominent, Wallerstein’s work has also been translated into Spanish and disseminated widely in Venezuela, at nominal cost, in recognition of the utility of his analysis for the twenty-first century socialism project (e.g., Wallerstein: 2007; 2008). We mention this not to enter ongoing debate about the Venezuelan case, though here again one of the authors is actively engaged (e.g., Griffiths; 2010a; 2010b), but to highlight the relevance of Wallerstein’s and Mészáros’ work to those at the cutting edge of elaborating systemic alternatives to capitalism for this century.

One distinguishing aspect of these scholars’ work is its big picture, or macro, approach to the analysis and understanding of social phenomena. Wallerstein explicitly acknowledges and advocates the need for such an approach, this being at the core of the project he labels the “historical social sciences” and its accompanying alternative ways of viewing time and space in terms of historical cycles, structures, and transformational possibilities (Wallerstein: 1997a; 1998b). The claim here is that the social sciences, tied to nomethetic or idiographic epistemologies, have tended to center on notions of eternal or episodic timespace respectively, which are inadequate to the task of understanding social reality. The very project of world-systems analysis, however, aims to generate viable and, where possible, widely agreed upon interpretations or understandings of social reality from a macro and historical perspective.

Mészáros’ approach has, from a different perspective, questioned the development of this reality in his two-volume work, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness (Mézsáros: 2010a; 2011). In this tour-de-force of the social sciences, Mészáros sought to unpack the historical development of what is considered to be the modern epistemological position on human beings and how societies historically developed. His challenge to a number of fundamental truth-claims was precisely to pinpoint how unity and universality, among other things, remain a set of contested ideas in our understanding of the world.

Another characteristic of these scholars’ work is its multi- or inter-disciplinary nature, defying simple categorizations that might seek to contain or limit its scope. Wallerstein’s four volume series, The Modern World-System, for example, is reminiscent of other major historical works like Eric Hobsbawm’s four-volume, The Age of Revolution / Capital / Empire / Extremes, or Braudel’s three volumes on Civilization and Capitalism.

Wallerstein’s historical work involves a particular world-systems historiography, shaping the selection and use of source materials, and the reasoning behind the conclusions drawn from the analysis of them, just as Hobsbawm’s more orthodox Marxism shaped his earlier work. But Wallerstein’s work is perhaps better known in the disciplines of political science and sociology, which is indicative of the breadth or scope of his analysis. His own explicit project to reshape, or ‘unthink’ the social sciences, and his characterization of world-systems analysis as the historical social sciences, also connects directly with contemporary trends in academia toward such multi-disciplinary research projects. The work consciously and deliberately seeks to challenge established ways of structuring knowledge in favor of a holistic and unidisciplinary approach to the “study of totalities” (Wallerstein: 1999c, 196).

Mészáros’ scholarship shares this broad quality for two principal reasons: first, his work is deeply embedded in the original problems of Enlightenment philosophy in questioning all that we know, and second, his work remains in the structural Marxist camp in that he is examining humanity as a whole, not constituent parts divided along disciplinary lines. As such, his holistic view of the problems of contemporary humanity resist the simple classifications of disciplinary approaches found in the established social sciences.

In this volume, we bring the macro and holistic approaches of Wallerstein and Mészáros to bear on the long-standing, big policy question of work, and of education as preparation for work, under the conditions of capitalism. The influence of human capital theory on the official and primary purposes of national education systems is profound, and despite its apparent failure even in its own terms over many decades, this logic persists across the globe. The sort of meta-perspective that Wallerstein and Mészáros have developed provides some key explanatory purchase for such a global educational policy across time and geographical/political/socio-cultural space. Our consideration of such educational phenomena through their analytical lenses puts the focus, on the one hand, on macro level considerations of the inherent needs and contradictions of capitalism/the capitalist world economy. Among these are its drive to maximize profits and the accumulation of capital—including efforts to minimize taxation and wage costs—to externalize production and particularly environmental costs, and, if necessary, to relocate capital and production within the world-economy to achieve these ends. This level of analysis generates particular insights into the question of education as preparation for work; such insights move beyond existing literature in the comparative education field.

For example, comparative researchers have thoroughly tracked and critiqued the application of human capital theory in education, and its manifestation in policies of regional and international institutions (e.g., Dale and Robertson: 2009; Klees et al.: 2012). Typically, however, this work continues to be locked into an orthodox developmentalist paradigm, in the sense that it advances an ameliorative program of greater equity and meritocracy to better distribute the development rewards. This is not to downplay the rigorous critiques of current policy failings, particularly the ways in which neoliberal educational policies work directly to exacerbate social inequalities, but to shed light on the contributions that Wallerstein’s and Mészáros’s perspectives bring. Their demand that we unthink the basic development assumptions under conditions of global capitalism fundamentally changes the way we approach policies like education for human capital formation.

If what Wallerstein describes as the promises of liberalism are simply unachievable for the majority under current political and economic arrangements—and popular acknowledgement of this is growing—then our attention shifts to the construction of replacement paradigms aligned to non-capitalist alternatives and to a definitive critique of policy defining education as preparation for work.

Questioning and rethinking the basic purposes of education systems is a common feature of educational research, including that of advancing greater equity through a fairer and more meritocratic distribution of educational credentials that are converted into occupational and social and economic outcomes. Here we might find, for example, a range of critiques of the reproductive function of mass education under the banner of preparation for work, highlighting its role in both sorting students for unequal futures, and to some degree legitimizing these unequal outcomes by virtue of the distribution of supposedly meritocratically earned educational credentials.

This is a long-standing field of research. The critique, however, is focused on the functional role of educational institutions in wider social inequalities and how it might be reformed in more meritocratic directions. Wallerstein and Mészáros turn this on its head by provoking a focus on the very nature of the social inequality under capitalism, its structural and historical dimensions, and the capacity for education systems to contribute to imagining and constructing non-capitalist futures. This challenge connects with the long-standing tradition of critical pedagogy which promotes educators’ actions to lift students’ critical consciousness of both the inequalities and injustices of social life, and the roles of education in these. We take this up in detail in chapter 4, which makes an argument for a ‘critical world-systems education.’

The limited use of Mészáros’ and Wallerstein’s scholarship within critical educational research is puzzling, given the depth and scope of their work elaborating the argument that we are in a historical moment of systemic crisis and transition, and a moment in which our capacity to exert our collective human agency, thereby influencing the nature and direction of this historic change, is heightened. As we have argued elsewhere (e.g., Griffiths and Knezevic: 2010), a strong case can be made for there being significant alignment between much comparative scholarship exploring the global dimensions of educational policy creation and dissemination, and Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis which decisively decenters the nation-state as the basic unit of analysis. Moreover, for educators and scholars with an interest in making sense of the complexities and uncertainties of twenty-first century social life—as part of some broad normative project to generate greater levels of equality, justice, and democracy—there is much that we can take from Wallerstein’s and Mészáros’ analyses.

Chapter Outline

Chapter 2 of this volume provides a thorough review of Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis, with a view to succinctly establishing the major thrusts and principles of this work. For readers with limited engagement with Wallerstein’s work, this chapter establishes the foundations of his approach. For all readers, this chapter illustrates the extent to which Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis is about education, through its focus on knowledge and reconstructing the social sciences, and its explicit political project of harnessing this reconstruction to the creation of substantively rational alternatives to capitalism.

Chapter 3 develops a detailed account of human capital theory from a Wallersteinean perspective. It argues that the inability of the capitalist world-system to deliver the associated promise of national economic development for all makes human capital theory inspired policies particularly weak or fragile, despite their apparent resilience over time. The need to unthink such policies, in light of the broader analysis, is said to generate intellectual space and op...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Wallerstein and Mészáros: Scholars for the Twenty-First Century
• Chapter 2 Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis
• Chapter 3 Mass Education and Human Capital in the Capitalist World-System
• Chapter 4 Educating Critical Citizens for an Alternative World-System
• Chapter 5 Mass Labor: Reviving the Concept of Community and Collectivity
• Chapter 6 Work in the Post-Industrial World
• Chapter 7 Global Capital: From the Polanyi Thesis to World-Systems and beyond Capital
• Chapter 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index