229 Seminar - Peter McLaren

Part of the problem faced by the educational left today is that even among the most progressive educators there appears to exist an ominous resignation produced by the seeming inevitability of capital, even as financial institutions expand capacity in inverse proportion to a decline in living standards and job security. It has become an article of faith in the critical educational tradition that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. When class relations are discussed, they are rarely ever talked about in the Marxist sense of foregrounding the labor/capital dialectic, surplus value extraction, or the structure of property ownership; instead, the conversation is directed towards consumption, lifestyle politics, theories of social stratification in terms of access to consumption, or job, income, and cultural prestige. The swan song for Marxist analysis apparently occurred during the intellectual collapse of Marxism in the 1980s after the Berlin Wall came crashing down and along with it a bipolar imperialist world. Capitalism was loudly proclaimed to be the victor over socialism. The globalisation of capital was the designated savior of the world's poor and powerless. But as we have begun to observe, its function, far from supplicatory or transitive, has been deadly alienating. Gobbling up the global lifeworld in the quest for an endless accumulation of surplus value, capital has produced some world-historical excretory excesses, turning the world into a global toilet of toxic waste while adding legions to Marx's reserve army of labour. The cutbacks in government expenditure on health, education and housing investment, the creation of shantytowns in urban industrial areas, the concentration of women in low-wage subcontracted work, the depletion of natural resources, the rampant de-unionisation, the growth of labour discipline, the expansion of temporary and part-time labour, the progressive diversion of capital into financial and speculative channels - what some have called "casino capitalism" on a world scale, the pushing down of wages and the steady decline of decent working conditions have all proceeded apace but the rule of capital is rarely challenged, only its current "condition'. In Russia today, the prikhvatizatisiya (grabitization) that has been bequeathed to the masses by a kleptocratic capitalism that dragged itself out of the carrion house of economic shock therapy has led to "blitzkrieg liquidations', the destruction of industry, the disappearance of health benefits and housing, the slashing of salaries, and the transfer of wealth to a dozen or so private owners who now commandeer one public property. As poverty shifts from 2 percent to 50 percent, Western freemarket fundamentalists keep reminding the Russians how awful it must have been to live under communism. Western countries that had established their economic fiefdoms by protecting key industries and subsidising some domestic producers continue to preach the gospel of free trade and deregulation to other countries. Even when the messianic monopoly fantasies of CEOs from Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossings culminate in bankruptcy disasters that shake the very pillars of the hallowed marketplace, the belief in the sanctity of the market remains undisturbed. Capital stealthily hides behind Nietzsche's unsullied veil, maintaining its secret of reversibility--that its economic assistance to the Third World reproduces underdevelopment and ensures the continuity of dependency.

The belief in the single-model neoliberal alternative had pullulated across the global political landscape before the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, attaching itself like a fungus to regional and national dreams alike. The winds of the Cold War had spread its spores to the farthest reaches of the globe. After laying dormant for a decade, these spores have been reactivated and have seemingly destroyed our capacity to dream otherwise. Today most nations celebrate capital as the key to the survival of democracy. Watered by the tears of the poor and cultivated by working-class labour, the dreams that sprout from the unmolested soil of capital are those engineered by the ruling class. Plowed and harrowed by international cartels of transnational corporations, freemarketeers, and global carpetbaggers poised to take advantage of Third World nations in serious financial debt to the West, the seeds of capitalism have yielded a record-breaking harvest. The capitalist dream factories are not only corporate board rooms and production studios of media networks that together work to keep the capitalist dream alive, but a spirit of mass resignation that disables the majority of the population from realizing that capitalism and exploitation are functional equivalents, that globalisation of capital is just another name for what Lenin (1951) termed imperialism. United States imperialism--what Tariq Ali (2002, p. 281) calls "the mother of all fundamentalisms"--has decamped from its Keynesian position of pseudo-liberalism to fully embrace a fanatical neo-liberalism. The grand mullah of neo-liberalism, Von Hayek, an avatar to both Thatcher and Reagan,

favored military actions to defend US interests abroad. On the domestic front he favoured the invisible magic of a manipulated market. No state intervention against the interests of capital was to be tolerated. But the state was vital to undertake military operations in the sphere of international relations. (Ali, 2002, p. 286)

Further, Von Hayek's neo-liberal followers

were staunch defenders of the Vietnam war. They supported the US-backed military coup in Chile. In 1979, Hayek favoured bombing Tehran. In 1982, during the Malvinas conflict, he wanted raids on the Argentinian capital. This was the creed of neo-liberal hegemony most favoured by its founder. (Ali, 2002, p. 286)

The fact that neoliberalism--the midwife to the return of a fanatical belief in non-state intervention into capital movements that was spawned by 19^th century libertarianism--has resoundingly defeated the bureaucratic state capitalism of the former Soviet "evil empire', creating a seismic shift in the geopolitical landscape. Michael Parenti grimly comments that the overthrow of the Soviet Union has abetted a reactionary "rollback" of democratic gains, public services, and common living standards around the world as the US continues to oppose economic nationalism and autonomous development in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, primarily though enforcing debt payments and structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Particularly hard hit have been the so-called Third World countries. The Soviet Union's collapse has opened the political floodgates of U.S. imperialism, permitting the US to pursue virtually uncontested an agenda of "arrogance and brutality". The U.S. is no longer faced with a competing superpower that imposed constraints on the dream of US. Global dominance. Parenti offers this disillusioned comment:

The record of US international violence just in the last decade is greater than anything that any socialist nation has ever perpetrated in its entire history. US forces or proxy mercenary forces wreaked massive destruction upon Iraq, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, East Timor, Libya, and other countries. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the US national security statewas involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places. And US forces occupied Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, and were deployed across the globe at some 300 major overseas bases--all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, counter-terrorism, and humanitarianism. (2002, p. 44).

Today's international political economy is the toast of the global ruling class, and the bourgeoisie see it as their biggest opportunity in decades to join their ranks. Freemarketeers have been given the New World Order's imprimatur to loot and exploit the planet's resources and to invest in global markets without restriction with impunity. The menacing concomitant of capital's destructive juggernaut is the obliteration of any hope for civilisation, let alone democracy. While liberals are plumping for fairer distribution of economic resources, the working-class are taught to feel grateful for the squalid working conditions of the maquiladoras that are now sprouting up in countries designated to provide the cheap labor and dumping grounds for pollution for the Western democracies. The poor and powerless are taught that socialism and communism are congenitally evil and can only lead to a totalitarian dictatorship. In short, capitalism and the legitimacy of private monopoly ownership has been naturalised as common sense.

It is no longer just the capitalists who believe that they are the salvation for the world's poor, but the workers themselves have become conditioned to believe that without their exploiters, they would no longer exist. The entrails of the eviscerated poor now serve as divining mechanisms for the soothsayers of the investment corporations. Even many trade unions have served as little more than adjuncts of the state, reimposing the discipline of capital's law of value. Those who wish to avoid both Communist-type centralized planning and the disequilibrium and instability of laissez-faire capitalism have turned to a type of market socialism through labour-managed firms, but have done little to challenge the deep grammar of capital itself.

Everywhere we look, social relations of oppression and contempt for human dignity abound. It is not that workers are being press-ganged to serve in the social factory; it is more like they are being made to feel grateful that they have some source of income, as meagre as that may be. As the demagogues of capitalist neo-liberal globalization spin their web of lies about the benefits of "global trade" behind erected "security" walls, protesters are gassed, beaten and killed. As the media boast about the net worth of corporate moguls and celebrate the excesses of the rich and famous, approximately 2.8 billion people--almost half of the world's people--struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars (U.S.) a day (McQuaig, 2001:27).

As schools become increasingly financed by corporations that function as service industries for transnational capitalism, and as bourgeois think-tank profiteerism and educational professionalism continues to guide educational policy and practice, the United States population faces a challenging educational reality. Liberals are calling for the need for capital controls, controls in foreign exchange, the stimulation of growth and wages, labor rights enforcement for nations borrowing from the United States, and the removal of financial aid from banking and capital until they concede to the centrality of the wage problem and insist on labor rights. However, very few are calling for the abolition of capital itself.

The commercialization of higher education, the bureaucratic cultivation of intellectual capital--what Marx referred to in the Grundrisse as the "general intellect' or "social brain'--and its tethering to the machinery of capital, the rise of industrial business partnerships, the movement of research into the commercial arena of profit and in the service of trade organizations and academic-corporate consortia, have all garnered institutions of higher learning profound suspicion by those who view education as a vehicle for emancipation. In the hands of the technozealots, teachers are being re-proletarianized and labor is being disciplined, displaced, and deskilled. Teacher autonomy, independence, and control over work is being severely reduced, while workplace knowledge and control is given over more and more to the hands of the administration.

The educational left is finding itself without a revolutionary agenda for challenging in the classrooms of the nation the effects and consequences of the new capitalism. As a result, we are witnessing the progressive and unchecked merging of pedagogy to the productive processes within advanced capitalism. Education has been reduced to a sub-sector of the economy, designed to create cybercitizens within a teledemocracy of fast-moving images, representations, and lifestyle choices brought powered by the seemingly frictionlessness of finance capital. Capitalism has been naturalized as commonsense reality - even as a part of nature itself - while the term "social class" has been replaced by the less antagonistic term, "socioeconomic status."

Critical Pedagogy and the Primacy of Political Struggle

It is impossible to disclose all the operative principles of critical pedagogy. To penetrate the glimmering veil of rhetoric surrounding it would require an essay of its own. Suffice it here to underscore several of its salient features. First and foremost, it is an approach to curriculum production, educational policymaking, and teaching practices that challenges the received "hard sciences" conception of knowledge as "neutral" or "objective" and that is directed towards understanding the political nature of education in all of its manifestations in everyday life as these are played out in the agonistic terrain of conflicting and competing discourses, oppositional and hegemonic cultural formations, and social relations linked to the larger capitalist social totality. Critical pedagogy has its importance in understanding the mechanisms of oppression imposed by the established order. But such an understanding is approached from the perspective of the dispossessed and oppressed themselves. It is an encounter with the process of knowledge production from within the dynamics of a concrete historical movement that transcends individuality, dogmatism, and certainty. Only within the framework of a challenge to the prevailing social order en toto is it possible to transform the conditions that make and remake human history. Specifically in the context of school life, capital produces new human productive and intellectual capacities in alienated form. Critical pedagogy's basic project over the last several decades has been to adumbrate the problems and opportunities of political struggle through educational means as a means of challenging the alienation of intellectual capacity and human labour. In is incoherent to conceptualize critical pedagogy, as do many of its current exponents, without an enmeshment with the political and anti-capitalist struggle.

In its U.S. variants, the genesis of critical pedagogy can be traced to the work of Paulo Freire in Brazil, and John Dewey and the social reconstructionists writing in the post-depression years. Its leading exponents have cross-fertilized critical pedagogy with just about every transdisciplinary tradition imaginable, including theoretical forays into the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and the work of Richard Rorty, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Here the focus mainly has been on a critique of instrumental reason and the nature of governmentality in educational sites. An emphasis has been placed on the non-conceptual in which thinking is constructed as a performance of ethics, or as a post-truth pragmatics, or as an open-ended, non-determinate process that resists totalizing tropological systems (hence the frequent condemnation of Marxism as an oppressive totalizing master narrative). Critical pedagogy's reach now extends to multicultural education, bi-lingual education, and fields associated with language-learning and literacy (including media literacy). Clearly, critical pedagogy is checkered with tensions and conflicts and mired in contradictions and should in no way be seen as a unified discipline.

I do not wish to rehearse this decidedly potted history here since it will serve little purpose other than adding cumbersomely to its growing historical weight or rehashing what I assume most progressive educators already know or about which they at least have some working idea.

In the mid-seventies to mid-eighties the role of critical pedagogy was much more contestatory than in the decade of the nineties with respect to dominant social and economic arrangements. Critical pedagogy has always had an underground rapport with the working-class, a rapport which virtually disappeared post-1989. In contrast to its current incarnation, the veins of critical pedagogy were not in need of defrosting in the early 1980s but were pumped up with Marxist-inspired work coming from the Birmingham School of Contemporary Cultural Studies, as well as a reengagement with the work of John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and the Frankfurt School. During that time, critique flowed generally unimpeded and was directed not simply at isolated relations of domination but at the totality of social relations. That it was often conflated with liberation theology in Latin America and with anti-imperialist struggle world-wide accounts for its failure to be preconised in the cultural chambers of the ruling elite.

Critical Pedagogy: Contemporary Challenges for the Educational Left

Critical pedagogy has had a tumultuous relationship with the dominant education community both in North America (McLaren, 1997) and the United Kingdom (Allman, 1999; 2001a) for the past twenty-five years. Clearly, on both sides of the Atlantic, the educational community has been aprioristically antagonistic to Marxist critique, effectively undercutting the development of Marxist criticism in education. Many of the current attempts to muster a progressive educational agenda among education scholars in suffused with an anti-communist bias. Only occasionally is the excessive rejectionism of Marxism by postmodern educationalists accompanied by analysis; rarely is it ever accomplished beyond the level of fiat. To borrow a commentary that Barbara Foley (1998) directs at the post-Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe, "it conflates politics with epistemology in an irrevocably linked chain of signifiers: the authoritarian party equals class reductionism equals logocentricity; totality equals totalitarianism".

Our own practices -- what Paula Allman (2001a) has christened "revolutionary critical pedagogy" -- ups the radical ante for progressive education which, for the most part over the last decade, has been left rudderless amidst an undertow of domesticating currents. It ups this ante by pivoting around the work of Karl Marx, Paulo Freire, and Antonio Gramsci and in doing so brings some desperately needed theoretical ballast to the teetering critical educational tradition. Such theoretical infrastructure is necessary, we argue, for the construction of concrete pedagogical spaces -- in schools, university seminar rooms, cultural centres, unions, social movements, popular forums for political activism, etc. -- for the fostering and fomenting of revolutionary praxis.

While it certainly remains the case that too many teachers take refuge in a sanctuary of assertions devoid of critical reflection, it would be wrong to admonish the educational activism of today as a form of pedagogical potvaliancy. Courageous attempts are being made in the struggle for educational reform in both North America and the United Kingdom. In this case, we need to be reminded that the lack of success of the educational Left is not so much the result of the conflicted sensibilities of critical educators, as it is a testament to the preening success of Western Cold War efforts in indigenising the cultural logic of capitalism, the fall of the Eastern Bloc non-profit police states, and the degradation and disappearance of Marxist meta-narratives in the national-popular agendas of decolonising countries. It can also be traced to the effects of the labor movement tradition which keeps labor-left educators struggling inside the labor/capital antagonism by supporting labour over capital, rather than attempting to transcend this divide entirely through efforts to implode the social universe of capital out of which the labor/capital antagonism is constituted.

The critical pedagogy we are envisioning here operates from the premise that capital in its current organisational structure provides the context for working-class struggle. Our approach to understanding the relationship between capitalism and schooling and the struggle for socialism is premised upon Marx's value theory of labor as developed by British Marxist educationalist, Glenn Rikowski, and others (see Cole, Hill, McLaren, and Rikowski, 2001). In developing further the concept of revolutionary critical pedagogy and its specific relationship to class struggle, it is necessary to focus on labour's value form. We follow the premise that value is the substance of capital. Value is not a thing. It is the dominant form that capitalism as a determinate social relation takes. Following Dinerstein and Neary (2001), capital can be conceived as "value-in-motion." Marx linked the production of value to the dual aspect of labor. Workers do not consume what they produce but work in order to consume what others have produced. Labor is thus riveted in both use-value and exchange-value (see also Allman, 2000, 2001; Rikowski, 2000b, 2001a, 2001d). Domination in this view is not so much by other people as by essentially abstract social structures that people constitute in their everyday social intercourse and socio-political relations. In the Grundrisse, Marx emphasised that "society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselvesä[Thus,] to be a slave or to be a citizen are social determinations" (cited in San Juan, 1996, p. 248). Labour, therefore, has a historically specific function as a social mediating activity.

Labour materialises itself both as commodified forms of human existence (labour-power) and structures that constitute and enforce this process of generalised social mediation (such as money and the state) against the workers who indirectly constituted them. These determinate abstractions (abstract labour) also constitute both human capital and the class struggle against the exploitation of living labour and the "capitalisation" of human subjectivity. This split within capital-labour itself is founded on the issue of whether labour produces value directly or labour-power. Following Dinerstein and Neary (2001), we adopt the premise that abstract labour is underwritten by value-in-motion, or the expansive logic of capital (referring to the increases in productivity required to maintain capitalist expansion). Abstract labour is a unique form of social totality that serves as the ground for its own social relation. It is socially average labour-power that is the foundation of the abstract labour that forms value (Rikowski, 2001d). In the case of abstract labour, labour materialises itself twice -- first as labour and the second time as "the apparently quasi-objective and independent structures that constitute and enforce this process of generalised social mediation: money (economics) and the state (politics) against the workers who constituted them" (Neary, 2001, p. 7; see also Postone, 1996). This value relation -- captured in the image of the capitalist juggernaut driving across the globe for the purpose of extracting surplus-value (profit) -- reflects how the abstract social dimension of labour formally arranges (through the imposition of socially necessary labour-time) the concrete organisation of work so that the maximum amount of human energy can be extracted as surplus-value. Here, concrete labour (use-value) is overwhelmed by abstract labour (value-in-motion) so that we have an apparently non-contradictory unity. That is to say, capital's abstract-social dimension dominates and subsumes the concrete material character of labour and so becomes the organising principle of society -- the social factory where labour serves as the constituent form of its own domination. This is the process of "real subsumption" where humanity's "vital powers" are mightily deformed. This helps to explain how workers become dominated by their own labour. Labour becomes the source of its own domination.

Education and training are what Rikowski refers to as processes of labour-power production. They are, in Rikowski's view, a sub-species of relative surplus value production (the raising of worker productivity so that necessary labour is reduced) that leads to a relative increase in surplus labour time and hence surplus value. Human capital development is necessary for capitalist societies to reproduce themselves and to create more surplus value. The core of capitalism can thus be undressed by exploring the contradictory nature of the use value and exchange value of labour-power.

Within the expansive scope of revolutionary critical pedagogy, the concept of labour is axiomatic for theorising the school/society relationship and thus for developing radical pedagogical imperatives, strategies, and practices for overcoming the constitutive contradictions that such a coupling generates. The larger goal that revolutionary critical pedagogy stipulates for radical educationalists involves direct participation with the masses in the discovery and charting of a socialist reconstruction and alternative to capitalism. However, without a critical lexicon and interpretative framework that can unpack the labour/capital relationship in all of its capillary detail, critical pedagogy is doomed to remain trapped in domesticated currents and vulgarised formations. The process whereby labour -power is transformed into human capital and concrete living labour is subsumed by abstract labour is one that eludes the interpretative capacity of rational communicative action and requires a dialectical understanding that only historical materialist critique can best provide. Historical materialism provides critical pedagogy with a theory of the material basis of social life rooted in historical social relations and assumes paramount importance in uncovering the structure of class conflict as well as unravelling the effects produced by the social division of labour. Today, labour-power is capitalised and commodified and education plays a tragic role in these processes. According to Rikowski, education "links the chains that bind our souls to capital. It is one of the ropes comprising the ring for combat between labour and capital, a clash that powers contemporary history: "the class struggle"" (2001d, p.2). Schools therefore act as vital supports for, and developers of, the class relation, "the violent capital-labour relation that is at the core of capitalist society and development" (2001d, p.19)

In so far as schooling is premised upon generating the living commodity of labour-power, upon which the entire social universe of capital depends, it can become a foundation for human resistance. In other words, labour-power can be incorporated only so far. Workers, as the sources of labor-power, can engage in acts of refusing alienating work and delinking labor from capital's value form. As Dyer-Witheford argues: "Capital, a relation of general commodification predicated on the wage relation, needs labor. But labor does not need capital. Labor can dispense with the wage, and with capitalism, and find different ways to organize its own creative energies: it is potentially autonomous" (1999, p. 68, italics original).

In so far as education and training socially produce labour-power, this process can be resisted. As Dyer-Witheford notes: "In academia, as elsewhere, labor power is never completely controllable. To the degree that capital uses the university to harness general intellect, insisting its work force engage in lifelong learning as the price of employability, it runs the risk that people will teach and learn something other than what it intends" (1999, p. 236). Critical educators push this "something other" to the extreme in their pedagogical praxis centered around a social justice, anti-capitalist agenda. The key to resistance, in our view, is to develop a critical pedagogy that will enable the working class to discover how the use-value of their labor-power is being exploited by capital but also how working class initiative and power can destroy this type of determination and force a recomposition of class relations by directly confronting capital in all of its hydra-headed dimensions. Efforts can be made to break down capital's control of the creation of new labor-power and to resist the endless subordination of life to work in the social factory of everyday life (Cleaver, 2000; see also Rikowski, 2001). Students and education workers can ask themselves: What is the maximum damage they can do to the rule of capital, to the dominance of capital's value form? Ultimately, the question we have to ask is: Do we, as radical educators, help capital find its way out of crisis, or do we help students find their way out of capital? The success of the former challenge will only buy further time for the capitalists to adapt both its victims and its critics, the success of the later will determine the future of civilisation, or whether or not we will have one.

The struggle among what Marx called our "vital powers", our dispositions, our inner selves and our objective outside, our human capacities and competencies and the social formations within which they are produced, ensures the production of a form of human agency that reflects the contradictions within capitalist social life. Yet these contradictions also provide openness regarding social being. They point towards the possibility of collectively resolving contradictions of "everyday life' through revolutionary/transformative praxis (Allman, 1999). Critical subjectivity operates out of practical, sensuous engagement within social formations that enable rather than constrain human capacities. Here critical pedagogy reflects the multiplicity and creativity of human engagement itself: the identification of shared experiences and common interests; the unravelling of the threads that connect social process to individual experience; rendering transparent the concealed obviousness of daily life; the recognition of a shared social positionality; unhinging the door that separates practical engagement from theoretical reflection; the changing of the world by changing one's nature.

Our work in critical pedagogy constitutes in one sense the performative register for class struggle. While it sets as its goal the decolonization of subjectivity, it also emphasizes the development of critical social agency while at the same time targeting the material basis of capitalist social relations. Critical educators seek to realize in their classrooms social values and to believe in their possibilities--consequently we argue that they need to go outside of the protected precincts of their classrooms and analyze and explore the workings of capital there. Critical revolutionary pedagogy sets as its goal the reclamation of public life under the relentless assault of the corporatisation, privatization and businessification of the lifeworld (which includes the corporate-academic-complex). It seeks to make the division of labor coincident with the free vocation of each individual and the association of free producers. At first blush this may seem a paradisiac notion in that it posits a radically eschatological and incomparably "other" endpoint for society as we know it. Yet this is not a blueprint but a contingent utopian vision that offers direction not only in unpicking the apparatus of bourgeois illusion but also in diversifying the theoretical itinerary of the critical educator so that new questions can be generated along with new perspectives in which to raise them. Here the emphasis not only is on denouncing the manifest injustices of neoliberal capitalism and serving as a counterforce to neoliberal ideological hegemony, but also on establishing the conditions for new social arrangements that transcend the false opposition between the market and the state.

In contrast to postmodern education, revolutionary pedagogy emphasizes the material dimensions of its own constitutive possibility and recognizes knowledge as implicated within the social relations of production (i.e., the relations between labor and capital). I am using the term materialism here not in its postmodernist sense as a resistance to conceptuality, a refusal of the closure of meaning, or whatever "excess' cannot be subsumed within the symbol or cannot be absorbed by tropes; rather, materialism is being used in the context of material social relations, a structure of class conflict, and an effect of the social division of labor (Ebert, 2002). Historical changes in the forces of production have reached the point where the fundamental needs of people can be met--but the existing social relations of production prevent this because the logic of access to "need" is "profit" based on the value of people's labor for capital. Consequently, critical revolutionary pedagogy argues that without a class analysis, critical pedagogy is impeded from effecting praxiological changes (changes in social relations). Critical revolutionary pedagogy begins with a three-pronged approach: First, students engage in a pedagogy of demystification centering around a semiotics of recognition, where dominant sign systems are recognized and denaturalized, where common sense is historicized, and where signification is understood as a political practice that refracts rather than reflects reality, where cultural formations are understood in relation to the larger social factory of the school and the global universe of capital. This is followed by a pedagogy of opposition, where students engage in analyzing various political systems, ideologies, and histories, and eventually students begin to develop their own political positions. Inspired by a sense of ever-imminent hope, students take up a pedagogy of revolution, where deliberative practices for transforming the social universe of capital are developed and put into practice. Revolutionary critical pedagogy supports a totalizing reflection upon the historical-practical constitution of the world, our ideological formation within it, and the reproduction of everyday life practices. It is a pedagogy with an emancipatory intent.

Practising revolutionary critical pedagogy is not the same as preaching it. Revolutionary critical educators are not an apocalyptic group; they do not belong to a predicant order bent on premonising the capitalist crisis to come. Revolutionary critical pedagogy is not in the business of presaging as much as it is preparatory; it is in the business of pre-revolutionising: preparing students to consider life outside the social universe of capital -- to "glimpse humanity's possible future beyond the horizon of capitalism" (Allman, 2001a, p.219). What would such a world be like? What type of labour would be -- should be -- carried out? Thus, critical revolutionary pedagogy is committed to a certain form of futurity, one that will see wage labour disappear along with class society itself.

But revolutionary critical pedagogy is not born in the crucible of the imagination as much as it is given birth in its own practice. That is, revolutionary critical education is decidedly more praxiological than prescored. The path is made by walking, as it were. Revolutionary educators need to challenge the notion implicit in mainstream education, that ideas related to citizenship have to travel through predestined contours of the mind, falling into step with the cadences of common sense. There is nothing common about common sense. Educational educators need to be more than the voice of autobiography, they need to create the context for dialogue with the Other so that the other may assume the right to be heard.

The principles that help to shape and guide the development of our "vital powers' in the struggle for social justice via critical/revolutionary praxis have been discussed at length by Allman (2001a, pp.177-186). These include: principles of mutual respect, humility, openness, trust and co-operation; a commitment to learn to "read the world" critically and expending the effort necessary to bring about social transformation; vigilance with regard to one's own process of self-transformation and adherence to the principles and aims of the group; adopting an "ethics of authenticity" as a guiding principle; internalising social justice as passion; acquiring critical, creative, and hopeful thinking; transforming the self through transforming the social relations of learning and teaching; establishing democracy as a fundamental way of life; developing a critical curiosity; and deepening one's solidarity and commitment to self and social transformation and the project of humanisation.

For those of us fashioning a distinctive socialist philosophy of praxis within North American context , it is clear that a transition to socialism will not be an easy struggle, given the global entrenchment of these aforementioned challenges. The overall task ahead is what Petras and Veltmeyer refer to, after Marx and Engels, as the creation of a dictatorship of the proletariat, not a dictatorship over the proletariat. It consists of managing the inherent contradiction between the internal socialist relations and the external participation in the capitalist marketplace. Meeting this challenge will require, among other things, a long list of initiatives, such as moving from a globalized imperial export strategy to an integrated domestic economy which entails reorienting the economy away from the reproduction of financial elites and replacing privatization with a socialization of the means of production (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2002). Joel Kovel makes the point that the transition to socialism will require the creation of a "usufructuary of the earth." Essentially this means restoring ecosystemic integrity across all of human participation--the family, the community, the nation, the international community. Kovel argues that use value must no longer be subordinated to exchange value but both must be harmonized with "intrinsic value. " The means of production (and it must be an ecocentric mode of production) must be made accessible to all as assets are transferred to the direct producers (i.e., worker ownership and control). Clearly, eliminating the accumulation of surplus value as the motor of "civilization' and challenging the rule of capital by directing money towards the free enhancement of use values goes against the grain of the transnational ruling class.

If every new society society carries its own negation within itself, then it makes sense for critical educators to develop a language of analysis that can help to identify the habits, ideas, and notions that help to shape and condition--either in a forward-or backward-looking way--the material and discursive forces of production. These habits, ideas, and notions--which stir as contradictions in the womb of subjectivity--are never static but always are in motion as possibilities given birth by history, that is, by class struggle. We need to develop a critical pedagogy, therefore, that can help students reconstruct the objective and subjective contexts of class struggle by examining the capitalist mode of production as a totality in relation to the aggregate of social relations that make the human--an examination that is centred upon Marx's labour theory of value. This mandates teaching students to think dialectically, to think in terms of "internal relations", such as creating an internal relation between diversity and unity, and between our individuality and our collectivity (Allman, 2001a). The idea here is not simply to play mediatively with ideas but to interrogate the social grammar of capitalist society inhibiting its refractory relations while struggling for a political recomposition of social subjects that want a different world; indeed, who seek a socialist alternative.

Literacy is power, power to make a difference, power to be a person, power to be real. Literacy is the kind of strategic knowledge that puts one in command of the details of an art, craft, organization, means of communication, or form of behavior. But in the social media this power to command communication is readily abused, and the audience can be trained to take the abuse for granted. The course seeks to expose the stereotypical but subtle ways in which many dominant educational discourses have depicted the most important of all relations -- relations between people--leaving an ever more violent legacy of attitudes and values that many people come unconsciously to accept as natural or normal or even to be desired. Taking an axiom that all behavior is communication, intended or understood or not, the course exposes the unstated codes of communication and ideologies that constrain our sense of how we view school/society relations and our own teaching practices without our conscious awareness or consent.

Monday, September 29
Introduction to the central themes of the Class
Discussion of Syllabus

Monday, October 6
Life In Schools (4th)
Mclaren
ISBN: 0205351182 Edition: Volume: Pub: Prentice Hall
2 page response required

Monday, October 13
Pedagogy Of The Oppressed (rev)
Freire
ISBN: 0826412769 Edition: Volume: Pub: Continuum Books
2 page response required

Monday, October 20
Revolutionary Social Transformation
Allman
ISBN: 0897898036 Edition: Volume: Pub: Bergin & Garvey Publishers Inc
2 page response required

Monday, October 27
Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life
Editors: Dennis Carlson and Greg Dimitriadis
ISBN: 0415944759 Edition: Volume: Pub: Taylor & Francis, Inc.
2 page response required
Deadline for submission of topics for class presentation

Monday, November 3
Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporation of Schools
Editors: Kenneth J. Saltman and David A. Gabbard
ISBN: 0415944899 Edition: Volume: Pub: Taylor & Francis, Inc.
2 page response required

Monday, November 10
Class cancelled. I will be lecturing in Korea.

Monday, November 17
Presentations

Monday, November 24
Presentations

December 1
Presentations

Dr. Peter McLaren

Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

Required Books

Overview of the Themes of the Course

The Crisis of the Educational Left in the United States

Critical Literacy

Suggested Questions to Raise about Class Readings

Assignments