A Marxist Epistle to the Transnational Capitalist Class

It should be self-evident that today a perduring state of contradiction exists in the United States, a country so overlaid by capitalist commodity production that as sellers of our labor-power we have lost the ability to recognize how we have been transformed into mere objects dominated by capital and how capital has arrogated to itself the promethean task of assuming the role of the subject of history. After all, since the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission in 2010 upholding the rights of corporations to make political expenditures under the First Amendment, the concept of corporate personhood has become as naturalized in our daily lexicon as citizens as the image of apple pie.

While the preservation and the self-expansion of the value of capital rests on the expropriation and exploitation of the working class — the direct producers — we do not surrender completely to the devastation and temptations of this neoliberal era: the rise of mammoth trusts, grim-faced speculators, and forms of workplace slavery that have increased in severity commensurately with the development of immiseration capitalism; the reproduction of our identities in virtual networks that further sunder any tenuous connectedness that had pre-existed the digitalization of the lifeworld, the instrumental and technocratic rationality of our learning, the commodious individualism and myths of self-reliance that have retreated beneath the layers of our experiences and have activated the deep contents of our psyche, stitching together the impecunious grace of our everyday life that wafts throughout the wounded and disfigured cities and towns of the nation. Nor have we given in completely to or the idea of American exceptionalism and providential history that guide the horror of our foreign policy.

We begin our resistance haltingly and meagerly but grow stronger incrementally as we advance into the arena of building socialism through critical pedagogy. We cannot unravel the institutional knot comprised of the subsisting contradictions of value production within capitalist democracy on our own. We need a transnational reach, which is why it is important today to conceive of critical pedagogy not solely as an approach to classroom instruction, but as a disposition, an introduction to a way of life, what I have called a philosophy of praxis.

The struggle to build a social universe outside of capitalist value production will not come mainly from the miners in the coal pits, the workers in pulp mills who abandon their cookers, boilers, chippers and gauges for a day of protest, but also from the students on our campuses, the unemployed university graduates, the office workers, cleaners, the clergy, the fire fighters and even some members of the military who see through the thickening tissue of urban life and have exposed the conditions of its growth.

This is a pivotal moment for humanity, when the meanings, values and norms of everyday life are arching towards oblivion, following in the debris-strewn wake of Benjamin’s Angel of History; when human beings are being distributed unevenly across the planet as little more than property relations, as ‘surplus populations’; when a culture of slave labor is increasingly defining the workaday world of American cities; when capital’s structurally instantiated ability to supervise our labor, control our investments and purchase our labor power has reached new levels of opprobrium; when those who are habitually relegated to subordinate positions within capital’s structured hierarchies live in constant fear of joblessness and hunger; and when the masses of humanity are in peril of being crushed by the hobnailed boots of Stormtrooper Capitalism. The winds of critical consciousness, enervated by outrage at the profligate use of lies and deceptions by the capitalist class – a class that gorgonizes the public through a winner-takes-all market fundamentalism and corporate-driven media spectacles – are stirring up the toxic debris from our austerity-gripped and broken humanity. There seems to be nothing standing in the way of capitalism’s continuation, save a few irritants in the alternative media that are flippantly swatted away from time to time, like flies on the arse of a barnyard goat. Today’s unrelenting urgency of redeeming life from the belligerent forces of social reproduction – the internally differentiated expanding whole of value production, inside of which is coiled an incubus – marks a watershed in the history of this planet.

Voices of desperation and resignation

The paradigmatic innovation of anti-colonial analysis in North America has been significantly impacted by what has been taking place since capital began responding to the crisis of the 1970s of Fordist-Keynesian capitalism – a move which has seen the development of a new transnational model of accumulation in which transnational fractions of capital have become dominant. New mechanisms of accumulation include a cheapening of labor and the growth of flexible, deregulated and de-unionized labor, where women always experience super-exploitation in relation to men; the dramatic expansion of capital itself; the creation of a global and regulatory structure to facilitate the emerging global circuits of accumulation; and, finally, neo-liberal structural adjustment programs which seek to create the conditions for unfettered operations of emerging transnational capital across borders and between countries (Robinson, 2000, 2004, 2008). In my work with teachers, education scholars, political activists and revolutionaries worldwide, I’ve repeatedly visited mean and lonely streets that span numerous counties, countries and continents. Whether I’ve been visiting the Roma district of Budapest, the barrios on the outskirts of Medellin, the cartel-controlled neighborhoods of Morelia or Juarez, the favelas of Rio or Sao Paulo, the crowded alleys of Delhi, the alleyways of Harbin (near the Siberian border), or the streets of South Central Los Angeles, I’ve encountered pain and despair among the many as a result of the exploitation by the few. Whether I’ve been speaking to hitchhikers caught in a snowstorm, Vietnam vets in overflowing homeless shelters, elderly workers in emergency warming centers whose food stamps had just been cut by Republican legislation, jobless men and women resting on pillows of sewer steam wafting through the cast iron grates of litter-strewn streets, a group of teenagers hanging out in strip malls festooned with faded pockmarked signs offering discount malt liquor, or day laborers crowded around hole-in-the-walls offering cheap pizza, I hear the same voices of desperation and resignation. Even in such concrete situations that reek of economic catastrophism, I would like to stress the importance of philosophy. That is, class struggle as cultivating a philosophy of praxis.

The aggrieved, the oppressed and the immiserated, who have subordinated themselves to existing social systems practicing a developmental terrorism, are awakening fitfully from their social amnesia and reminding those who choose to delay their hypnopompic state that, in standing idle, they risk being suffocated by their own past. The window of opportunity is growing smaller for protecting the world against the ghastly panorama of increasing mega-droughts, global warming, ozone depletion, marine and tropical forest habitat destruction, the ongoing and methodological destruction of the biosphere, pandemics, mass extinctions (including the possibility of human extinction), and a possible 1000-year period of unchecked warming, which has been referred to as the ‘Venus effect’, where all possibilities for life on earth will be utterly destroyed. Thus, the clarion call of First Nations peoples worldwide: ‘Idle No More! ’

Capitalism is more than the sheet anchor of institutionalized avarice and greed, more than excrement splattered on the coat-tails of perfumed bankers and well-heeled speculators – it is a ‘world-eater’ with an insatiable appetite. Capital has strapped us to the slaughter bench of history, from which we must pry ourselves free to continue our work of class and cultural struggle, creating working-class solidarity, an integral value system and internal class logic capable of countering the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, while at the same time increasing class consensus and popular support. Inherent in capitalist societies marked by perpetual class warfare and the capitalist mode of production is structural violence of a scale so staggering that it can only be conceived as structural genocide. Garry Leech (2012) has argued convincingly and with a savage aplomb that capitalist-induced violence is structural in nature and, indeed, constitutes genocide.

The conditions of inequality – stubbornly rationalized by the ruling class through the ideological state apparatus of schooling, religion and the media – beguile the people with everyday distractions and falsehoods, mystifying them with respect to their aspirations, loyalties and purposes. As new forms of development of the productive forces arise, existing economic relationships become a burden to the new economic system of production and, as a result of capital’s internal conflict, society reorganizes itself to accommodate these new relationships as the ruling class increases their legal and political demands (Pozo, 2003; McLaren, 2005). These central commissars of knowledge production, these sentinels of common sense, cannot abjure the powers of the working class to resist their immiseration by simply wishing them away (Hill, 2012). They need to control ideological production through discourses that obtain canonical value by assigning high rank to capitalist intellectuals and through constant repetition by means of mind-numbing cultural productions designed to distract the people from their woes and to disqualify the claims of the oppressed as unreasonable, impractical and unpatriotic (Best et al., 2011).

John Bellamy Foster (2013a,b) argues that we are living in an ‘epochal crisis’ – a term borrowed from Jason Moore – a tremulous period in which dire economic and ecological crises emerge inextricably entangled in each other. He cites systems ecologist Howard Odum’s revelation that Latin Americans, in particular, are being systematically robbed of their environmental resources through an unequal exchange in trade and production, in which ‘embodied energy’ is being withdrawn from the global South to the benefit of the global North – a situation which García Linera refers to as ‘extraterritorial surplus value’ (cited in Foster, 2013b). We are facing what Foster (2013a) describes as the unlimited expansion of a capitalist system geared to a process of abstract wealth creation. We are witnessing the displacement of natural-material use value by specifically capitalist use value, which does little more than enhance exchange value for the capitalist, so that the production of use value ceases and money creates money without producing any nature-material use value (Foster, 2013a). The ‘real economy’ is being hijacked by the irrational logic of monopoly-finance capitalism organized around financial-asset appreciation, which is dependent on an endless series of financial bubbles. Big corporations and wealthy investors, according to Foster (2013a), have ‘increasingly poured their surplus capital into the financial sphere in order to secure high speculative returns’. And all of this is occurring in the midst of human suffering, the magnitude of which is scarcely imaginable.

Critical Revolutionary Pedagogy

In the midst of the current epochal crisis, the US Department of Education and its spokespersons in the corporate media are diverting us away from the central issues of the crisis of capitalism and the ecological crisis by turning our attention to the failure of public schools (McLaren, 2006, 2012). They propose, as a solution, to smash public schools and the commons by unleashing the hurricane of privatization (the term hurricane is metaphorically appropriate here in a double sense, since New Orleans went from a public school system to a charter school city after Hurricane Katrina (see Democracy Now, 2007), causing unionized teachers to drop from 4700 to 500. Of course, this is not symptomatic only of the USA. We are facing the imperatives of the transnational capitalist class and so the challenge to public education is occurring on a transnational scale.

I wish to make a few comments about critical pedagogy as a lodestone through which we can consider how to organize the social division of labor and the realm of necessity, so as to enable humans to satisfy their social and individual needs. This is a daunting challenge, given that public education today is all but dead yet refuses to acknowledge its own demise, and its once proud luminaries fail to see how capitalism is one of the key factors that bears much of the responsibility. The terms of the debate over what to do with education’s rotting carcass are selectively adduced by blue-chip brokers in the flora-stuffed, starched-linen breakfast rooms of expensive hotels to remind the public in opulently elusive ways that the importance of education today revolves around increasing the range of educational choices available to communities by privatizing education. Consequently, the debate today – which could only be described as death-haunted and excremental – has an uncompromisingly narrow and understocked conceptual vocabulary, consisting of pithy yet comparatively slippery terms such as ‘free choice’, ‘common core’ , ‘competency-based education’ and ‘accountability’, all bound up in a supererogatory embrace of democracy. Competencies, which clearly define what students will accomplish to demonstrate learning for a workforce-related need, are an improvement in some ways – i.e. students can better pace themselves – but ultimately these competencies must be rendered measurable. All of these terms, of course, are endlessly retranscribable depending on what educational crisis happens to be the public’s flavor of the month. Standardized testing occupies a world where the humanity of students is enslaved to a particular analytic structure, combining instrumental reason, positivism and one-dimensional objectivity. Its heteronomous dogma is all about increasing control of our external and internal nature, creating a reified consciousness in which the wounds of our youth are hidden behind the armor of instrumentality. Reason has become irrational as the animate is confused with the inanimate; students are turned into objects where the imprint of unbeing is left upon being.

Under earlier dispensations, education had many names – it was paidea, it was critical citizenship, it was counter-hegemonic, it was transformational, it was a lot of things. Over time, its descriptions changed as its objects changed, and now it is distinguished by a special nomenclature most often drawn from the world of management and business. While critical educators have striven to formulate their work clearly, and have defended their arguments with formidable weapons of dialectical reasoning, there is a new call by some Marxists and eco-pedagogues to expand the struggle as anti-capitalist agitation. This is to be welcomed, of course, but education as a revolutionary process will likely not seem time-honored enough for most readers to take seriously, with the exception perhaps of the work of Paulo Freire, whose storied corpus of texts exerts a continuous subterranean pressure on the critical tradition, and amply and brilliantly demonstrates its best features.

Some, however, would argue that Freire’s work is as much about what education should be like after the revolution as it is about forging the revolution through a pedagogy of praxis. But if one considers revolutionaries such as Amílcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara and Hugo Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as educators, then socialist education will have some gold-standard forebears and less likely be banished into the outer darkness. If we consider the above list of educators as ancestors, we can begin to see ourselves as part of a distinguished tradition of warriors fighting for the conditions of possibility for a socially and economically just society. A further long-term task awaits the critical educator who combines competence as a political historian with skills in dialectical theory, with an eye to sustainability studies. But creating a subalternist historiography of critical education, and developing educational initiatives that foreground democratic national rights and the collective welfare of all peoples, assumes that the planet will survive the unipolar world of US hegemony.

While critical revolutionary pedagogy has made unwonted inroads into some tributaries of mainstream educational studies, it largely remains underappreciated, not so much for the pamphleteering exuberance that marks its tone, but for the fact that it has not been able to make successful inroads into public education. Yet such a failure is not due to the fact that critical pedagogy has chosen to remain in the stance of the ‘outsider’, refusing to collaborate with those adjacent conceptual and pedagogical systems that are its most eligible neighbors in the social sciences and humanities, but rather because it cannot exist in situ within the public education system and still remain true to its principles. This is because it is fundamentally a pedagogy of class struggle, carried out through multiple modalities – anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobic education, critical disability studies, etc. And the fact that each instantiation of critical pedagogy is traversed by the personal predilections of its exponents has given it an eclectic rather than systematic feel. In its current phase of theoretical gestation, there is a lack of univocal, reliable terminology. For now, it remains a pedagogy of hope, which does not mean that it must remain at a fierce remove from the everyday struggle for school reform. Critical pedagogy is still in its early birth pangs, and that it grows stronger the more its deficiencies are named only demonstrates that it is destined for longevity, and that such longevity is not fated to dissipate its native strength.

We do more than embrace the Geist of solidarity; we work towards its world-historical attainment in the pursuit of truth. A commitment to truth is never unproductive because no transformative act can be accomplished without commitment. No true act of commitment is an exit from the truth, but tramps down a path along which truth is won (Fischman & McLaren, 2005). I do not want to use my political imagination to create something new out of the debris of the old, because that leads us to adapt our revolutionary work to that which already exists. My concern is to struggle to change the conditions of what already exists and to liberate agency for its own conditions of possibility in order to create what was thought to be impossible.

Acknowledging fully the asymmetrical relations of power encapsulated in the uneven and combined development pervading the global South in relationship to the global North – a relation of extreme violence so necessary for us, as Western consumers, to enjoy our relatively middle-class lifestyles – we nevertheless struggle for something that is akin to Agamben’s ‘non-state’ or humanity, through a Gramscian attempt at a war of position, a Freirean praxis of conscientization or the permanent revolution found in Raya Dunayevskaya’s philosophy of praxis grounded in ‘absolute negativity’, and an ecological general strike of which the environmental caucus of the Industrial Workers of the World now speaks.

We look at the potential of the communal councils of the Bolivarian Revolution, which serve as public pedagogical sites for socialism and endogenous development, and to what Michael Lebowitz (2013) describes as ‘a vehicle for changing both circumstances and the protagonists themselves’, and deepening the struggle for socialism for the twenty-first century. Such a struggle is founded on revolutionary practice, famously described by Lebowitz (2013) as ‘the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change’. The new socialist society stresses that the control of production is vested in the producing individuals themselves. Productive relations are social as a result of conscious choice and not after the fact. They are social because, as Lebowitz (2013) perceptively notes, as a people we deliberately choose to produce for people who need what we can produce.

A New Epistemological Alternative

To look mainly to the European social tradition for guidance in the belief that the struggle for a socialist alternative to capitalism is the monopoly of the West would be to succumb to the most crude provinciality and a truncated ethnocentrism. Thomas Fatheuer (2011) has examined recent innovative aspects in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia. In Ecuador, for instance, the right to a ‘good life’ – buen vivir – becomes a central objective, a bread-and-butter concern that cannot be relinquished. One of the subsections of the constitution deals with the rights to nutrition, health, education and water, for example. The concept of the good life here is more than economic, social and cultural rights. It is a basic principle that ‘forms the foundation of a new development model (régimen de desarrollo)’ (Fatheuer, 2011, p. 16). Article 275 states: ‘Buen Vivir requires that individuals, communities, peoples and nations are in actual possession of their rights and exercise their responsibilities in the context of interculturalism, respect for diversity and of harmonious coexistence with nature’ (cited in Fatheuer, 2011, p. 16). Fatheuer distinguishes the concept of buen vivir from the Western idea of prosperity as follows:

Buen Vivir is not geared toward ‘having more’ and does not see accumulation and growth, but rather a state of equilibrium as its goal. Its reference to the indigenous world view is also central: its starting point is not progress or growth as a linear model of thinking, but the attainment and reproduction of the equilibrium state of Sumak Kausay. (Fatheuer, 2011, p. 16)

Instead of reducing citizens and non-citizens alike to their racialized and gendered labor productivity, as is the case with the neo-liberal state apparatus, we wish to introduce the term buen vivir as an opposing logic to the way we approach our formation as citizen-subjects. We would advise the guardians of the neo-liberal state – especially those who are now in the ‘business’ of education – to look towards Las Américas for new conceptions of democratic life that could serve as a means of breaking free from the disabling logic of neo-liberalism that now engulfs the planet – a new epistemology of living that has so far not been a casualty of the epistemicide of the conquistadores past and present. We still adhere to the proposition that the human mind lives in a largely self-created world of illusion and error, a defective system of false reality from whence we can be rescued only by the development of a critical self-reflexive subjectivity and protagonistic agency. But we would add that such self-creation occurs under conditions not of our own making. Many of those conditions have been created by social relations of production and the way in which neo-liberal capitalism has produced nature/human relations as a total world ecology linked to a racialized social division of labor and hyper-nationalism. Critical consciousness here becomes the inverse equivalent of the ignorance of our false consciousness under capitalist social relations of exploitation and alienation. Hence, we seek a social universe outside of the commodification of human labor, a universe deepened by direct and participatory democracy and a quest for buen vivir.

Critical revolutionary pedagogy is non-sectarian and emphasizes ecumenical approaches, attempting to incorporate a Marxist humanist critique of alienation under capitalism into the doxa of critical pedagogy – a move that recognizes consciousness and external reality as mutually constitutive, and asserts that there must be an ethical dimension which gives priority to the oppressed, thereby rejecting many of the ‘diamat’ tendencies that held sway in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries. Such tendencies maintained that they could uncover a transparent reflection of reality and that a focus on human consciousness, self-management and agency within popularly based social movements was unscientific, and that the central focus should be on social relations of production. By contrast, human agency and human needs are not conceptualized by Marxist humanists as secondary or epiphenomenal to objective social forces. Consequently, reform and revolution are not mutually antagonistic relationships, but must be understood in a dialectical relationship to each other. Dialectics does not juxtapose reform and revolution, but mediates them as a ‘both–and’ relationship rather than an ‘either–or’ relationship. The same is true with ecology and the grounding antagonism between capital and labor, such that class struggle is at one and the same time an ecological struggle, and Anderson (2010) rightly notes that we do not have to choose between immanence and transcendence.

Negations and Critical Transformation

However, in order to abolish capital, the negation of private property must itself be negated, which would be the achievement of a positivity – a positive humanism – beginning with itself. While it is necessary to negate private property, that negation must itself be negated. If you stop before this second negation then you are presupposing that having is more important than being (Hudis, 2012). Saying ‘no’ to capital, for instance, constitutes a first negation. When the subject becomes self-conscious regarding this negation – that is, when the subject understanding the meaning of this negation recognizes the positive content of this negation – then she has arrived at the negation of the negation. In other words, when a subject comes to recognize that she is the source of the negative, this becomes a second negation, a reaching of class consciousness. When a subject recognizes the positivity of the act of negation itself as negativity, then she knows herself as a source of the movement of the real. This occurs when human beings, as agents of self-determination, hear themselves speak, and are able both to denounce oppression and the evils of the world and to announce, in Freire’s terms, a liberating alternative. I fully agree with Reitz (2000, p. 263) that critical knowledge ‘is knowledge that enables the social negation of the social negation of human life’s core activities, the most central of which are neither being-toward-death [as Heidegger would maintain], nor subservience [as Kant would argue], but creative labor’. When subjects create critical knowledge, they then are able to appropriate freedom itself for the sake of the liberation of humanity (Pomeroy, 2004).

Searching for an alternative to capitalism means mining the dynamic potentiality that is latent, but unrealized, in everyday life and, in this regard, it is redolent of a spiritual quest in the manner suggested by Robert M. Torrance (1994). It requires a deliberate and urgent effort by teachers and teacher educators to transcend, through self-transformation, the limits of everyday reality and the human condition under capitalism, and a willingness to marshal this unbounded potentiality in the direction of social justice. It means realizing the enlarging and transformative potential of the given through a pursuit of the liberation of our collective humanity, a humanity that transcends the individual self not by seeking refuge in an immutable past or inertial present, but by advancing from subjective knowledge to the independently and objectively real that is always oriented to the determinable, living future – a knowledge that is the product of the human mind yet transcends the mind; a knowledge gleaned from the particular through its relationship to the universal; a knowledge that can never be fully apprehended; a knowledge engendered by the seeker yet at the same time transcending the seeker.

We must open our lexicon of critique and transformation to a changing world. Of course, the overall purpose of this critical transformation is to become emancipated from labor’s value form. We cannot know what the alternative to capitalist value production will look like until the struggle moves forward and we are able to claim some decisive victories. Only then can we know how we will proceed in forging a new alternative to capitalist commodity production. What is clear is that we must dissemble the self-referential closure of the capitalist trance state in which we find ourselves hopelessly enthralled. Through our passive exposure to electronic media, we willfully submit ourselves to the rituals of everyday capitalist commodity production, to their formulaic and habituated repetitiveness and invariance, to their inert sufferance and wearisome recurrence of stasis – all of which ineluctably and fatally disciplines us to assent uncritically to our own acedia and torpor. The only way out of this impasse is to seek an alternative social universe to that of value production.

This involves a pursuit, despite the fact that the goal can never be fully foreknown or finally attained. There is room for all at the banquet of liberation: trade unionists, civil libertarians, anarchists, students, anti-war activists, Marxists, black and Latino activists, teachers, eco-socialists, fast-food workers, factory workers and animal rights activists. We seek to replace instrumental reason with critical rationality, fostering popular dissent and creating workers’ and communal councils and community decision-making structures.

We continue to struggle in our educational projects to eliminate rent-seeking and for-profit financial industries; we seek to distribute incomes without reference to individual productivity, but rather according to need; and we seek to substantially reduce hours of labor and make possible, through socialist general education, a well-rounded and scientific and intercultural development of the young (Reitz, 2013). This involves a larger epistemological fight against neo-liberal and imperial common sense, and a grounding of our critical pedagogy in a concrete universal that can welcome diverse and particular social formations (San Juan, 2007) joined in class struggle. It is a struggle that has come down to us not from the distant past, but from thoughts that have ricocheted back to us from the future.

Here, I formally declare that we are shameless socialists attempting to transcend the limits of our own subjectivity not only by resisting the inculcation of capitalist schooling and social relations of exploitation and dreaming eschatologically but by acknowledging the otherness of the oppressed who seek in our pedagogies true liberation from needless suffering. We work for structural change as a necessary condition for personal change and those who fail to acknowledge this need as an absolute priority for critical education demonstrate by that very fact that their vaunted—even strident—desire to transform the lives of the most marginalized and despised in our society is as empty as a beer stein at Oktoberfest. We must take up the burden that conventional, neoliberal education has despaired of, and, necessarily, is incapable of since it smites the essential point of critical pedagogy—to shape the tangible and morally decisive settings in which learning occurs and, as such, heed the anguished cries of the oppressed while taking up the obligation to transform the world from a tomb of capitalist slavery to a world of direct producers who can enjoy the fruits of freely associated labor born in the fonts of a new society.

(written as a contribution for SCHULHEFT, a translated version will be published there. the tranlsation was supported by Knowledgebase Erwachsenenbildung)

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