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Feature: Globalization & Dialectics
May 2001
Education against capital today
Editor's note: Peter McLaren is a major voice in the world of critical
pedagogy and one of North America's leading exponents of the work of the
Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire. He is author/editor of 35 books on the
sociology of education, critical theory, and critical pedagogy. His latest
book, CHE GUEVARA, PAULO FREIRE, AND THE PEDAGOGY OF REVOLUTION (Rowman &
Littlefield), was reviewed in NEWS & LETTERS (October 2000). McLaren is
currently working on THE CRITICAL PEDAGOGY MANIFESTO and a book on
globalization and imperialism (with Ramin Farahmandpur). The following
consists of excerpts of a dialogue with Glenn Rikowski, author of THE
BATTLE IN SEATTLE.
PETER MCLAREN: Is philosophy really an Archimedean lever that can be used
to bring about human liberation? It's a question that has been posed to me
often by those who remain skeptical of philosophy and see it primarily as
an academic enterprise. Raya Dunayevskaya would, I believe, answer in the
affirmative.
GLENN RIKOWSKI: In what sense?
PETER: In the sense that philosophy can bring us closer to grasping the
specificity of the concrete within the totality of the universal--for
instance, the laws of motion of capital as it operates out of view of our
common-sense understanding.
Furthermore, philosophy plays a key role in enabling our understanding of
history as a process in which human beings make their own society, although
in conditions most often not of their own choosing. And further, the
practice of double negation can help us understand the movement of both
thought and action by means of praxis, or what Dunayevskaya called the
philosophy of history.
The philosophy of history proceeds from social reality and not from
abstract concepts (the latter is the bourgeois mode of thought). Here it is
necessary that critical educators seek to help students go through the
labor of the negative in order to see human development from the
perspective of the wider social totality. By examining Marx's specific
appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic, Dunayevskaya shows us how we can
comprehend more clearly how the positive is always contained in the
negative. It makes clear how every new society is the negation of the
preceding one, conditioned by the forces of production--which gives us an
opportunity for a new beginning.
While it is true that ideas are conditioned and correspond to the economic
structure of society, this in no way makes history unconditional. In his
THESE ON FEUERBACH, Marx wrote that circumstances are changed by human
beings, and not by abstract categories, and that the educator herself must
be educated. Economic structures constitute the drive-wheel of history; but
that doesn't mean that everything can be reduced to the sum of economic
conditions....
Dialectical movement is a characteristic not only of thought but also of
life and history itself. But today it appears that history has overtaken
us, that the educational left is running a losing race with history. The
idea of freedom wobbles precariously on shaking foundations, on the
scaffold of empty bourgeois dreams. Haven't we entered that monopoly stage
of capitalism that Lenin called imperialism--in which nearly the whole world
has been drawn into the capitalist system?
Marx noted that, in the words of philosopher Georg Lukács, that "the
commodity-form penetrates every corner of the social world." Aren't we very
close to this monstrous eventuality at the current historical moment? Isn't
the neoliberalism that has emerged with the collapse of state
demand--management and the Keynesian welfare state a particular species of
imperialism, one in which the inner contradictions have become exacerbated
beyond imagination?....
GLENN: What kind of pedagogy is needed in response to this?
PETER: We require a pedagogy that meets the conditions of the current
times. We need to understand that diversity and difference are allowed to
proliferate and flourish provided that they remain within the prevailing
formsof capitalist social arrangements.
Once anti-racism and anti-sexism begins to contest the hierarchical
imperatives of advanced capitalism, then such struggles are resisted by all
the power the state can muster. My own work has been to support anti-racist
and anti-sexist pedagogies, but to recast them within a larger project of
class struggle, particularly the struggle against the globalization of
capital. I have emphasized the need for educators to revisit the works and
lives of Freire and Che.
Furthermore, I believe that critical pedagogy could greatly benefit from
exploring the work of Raya Dunayevskaya, and other Marxist-Humanists such
as Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson. Dunayevskaya was critical of both U.S.
capitalist democracy and the state-capitalism of the Soviet Union--and for
good reasons. Both were concerned with the extraction of surplus labor from
workers, although in different ways.
Current conditions in both the U.S. and Russia are growing similar, as both
are experiencing variations of tycoon, or gangster capitalism. Because at
the present historical juncture, the contradictions of capitalism are
pushed to such unbearable extremes, Dunayevskaya felt it was important that
history and consciousness be examined from the perspective of the
development of labor. Her work on double negation captures the continuous
process of becoming. Her philosophy of absolute negativity as a
self-moving, self-active, and self-transcending method has a lot to
offer....
GLENN: So [we] need to understand how we, as human subjects, have been
capitalized--the human as capital; thus the struggle for humanism is
necessarily a struggle against capital, and against a specific form of
social being as capitalized life-form. That places the struggle to be
human, the de-capitalization of our existence, at the center of
contemporary anti-capitalist struggles. In turn, that situates
Marxist-Humanism at the core of any project to implode capital's social
universe, as a vital resource for de-capitalizing our individual and
collective social existences and the value-form of labor on which all this
rests.
PETER: The Marxist-Humanist educator recognizes that because the logic of
capitalist work has invaded all forms of human sociability, society can be
considered to be a totality of different types of labor. What is important
is to examine the particular forms that labor takes within capitalism.
Labor should not be taken as a given category, but interrogated as an
object of critique, and examined as an abstract social structure.
As you have pointed out in your own work, Glenn, value constitutes the very
matter and anti-matter of Marx's social universe. Educators like yourself
and Paula Allman have argued that the real problem is the internal or
dialectical relation that exists between capital and labor within the
capitalist production process itself--a social relation in which capitalism
is intransigently rooted.
This social relation--essential or fundamental to the production of abstract
labor--deals with how already existing value is preserved and new value
(surplus value) is created. It is this internal dialectical relationship
that is mainly responsible for the inequitable and unjust distribution of
use-values, and the accumulation of capital that ensures that the rich get
richer and the poor get poorer. It is this relation between capital and
labor that sets in perilous motion the conditions that make possible the
rule of capital by designating production for the market, fostering market
relations and competitiveness, and producing the historically specific laws
and tendencies of capital.
GLENN: We need to remember that the production of value is not the same as
the production of wealth.
PETER: Correct. The production of value is historically specific and
emerges whenever labor assumes its dual character as both use-value and
exchange-value. This dual character is not simply the distinction between
use-value and exchange-value but within value itself, in the distinction
between value and exchange-value. In order to see value, we have to
abstract from exchange-value. This enables us to emphasize the particular
social character of labor that produces commodities....
This is most clearly explicated in Marx's discussion of the contradictory
nature of the commodity form and the expansive capacity of the commodity
known as labor-power. In this sense, labor power becomes the supreme
commodity, the source of all value. For Marx, the commodity is highly
unstable, and non-identical. Its concrete particularity (use value) is
subsumed by its existence as value-in-motion, or by what we have come to
know as capital. (Value is always in motion because of the increase in
capital's productivity that is required to maintain expansion.)
Dunayevskaya notes in MARX'S CAPITAL AND TODAY'S GLOBAL CRISIS that "the
commodity in embryo contains all the contradictions of capitalism precisely
because of the contradictory nature of labor." What kind of labor creates
value? Abstract universal labor linked to a certain organization of
society, under capitalism. The dual aspect of labor within the commodity
(use value and exchange value) enables one commodity-money-to act as the
value measure of the commodity. Money becomes, as Dunayevskaya notes, the
representative of labor in its abstract form. Thus, the commodity must not
be considered a thing, but a social relationship....
The question is: What kind of labor should a human being do?...Capital, as
Marx pointed out, is a social relation of labor; it constitutes
objectified, abstract, undifferentiated--hence alienated--labor. Capital
cannot be controlled or abolished without dispensing with value production
and creating new forms of non-alienated labor. Creating these new forms of
non-alienated labor is the hope and promise of the future.
Let's consider for a moment the harsh reality of permanent mass
unemployment, contingent workforces, and the long history of strikes and
revolts of the unemployed. It is relatively clear from examining this
history that the trajectory of capitalism in no way subsumes class struggle
or the subjectivity of the workers.
What separates Marxist educators from liberals is that Marxists are not
content with advocating for better wages and working conditions, although
that is certainly an important goal. Of course, Marxist educators advocate
for a fairer distribution of wealth, arguing that the current inequitable
distribution that characterizes contemporary capitalist societies results
from property relations, in particular, the private ownership of the means
of production. However, to suggest that Marxism merely seeks elimination of
economic exploitation is to underestimate it. It pushes a great deal
further than the call for a fairer redistribution of wealth. As
Dunayevskaya teaches us, Marxism is profoundly humanistic; it works not
only for a more equitable redistribution of economic resources but also for
the liberation of humanity from the rule of capital.
GLENN: Perhaps Dunayevskaya's greatest contribution is her reanimation of
the Hegelian dialectic and her breakthrough work on negation of the
negation.
PETER: Dunayevskaya rethought Marx's relations to Hegelian dialectics in a
profound way....Dunayevskaya notes how Marx was able to put a living,
breathing, and thinking subject of history at the center of the Hegelian
dialectic. She also pointed out that what for Hegel is Absolute Knowledge
(the realm of realized transcendence), Marx referred to as the new society.
While Hegel's self referential, all-embracing, totalizing Absolute is
greatly admired by Marx, it is, nevertheless, greatly modified by him.
For Marx, Absolute knowledge (or the self-movement of pure thought) did not
absorb objective reality or objects of thought but provided a ground from
which objective reality could be transcended. By reinserting the human
subject into the dialectic, and by defining the subject as corporeal being
(rather than pure thought or abstract self-consciousness), Marx
appropriates Hegel's self-movement of subjectivity as an act of
transcendence and transforms it into a critical humanism.
In her rethinking of Marx's relationship to the Hegelian dialectic,
Dunayevskaya parts company with Derrida, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Negri,
Deleuze, Mészáros, and others. She has given absolute negativity a new
urgency, linking it not only to the negation of today's economic and
political realities but also to developing new human relations. Second
negation constitutes drawing out the positive within the negative,
expressing the desire of the oppressed for freedom.
GLENN: This shall be a form of praxis that takes us outside the social
universe of capital?
PETER: Yes. Abstract, alienated labor can be challenged by freely
associated labor and concrete, human sensuousness. The answer is in
envisioning a non-capitalist future that can be achieved by means of
subjective self-movement through absolute negativity so that a new relation
between theory and practice can connect us to the realization of freedom.
GLENN: A freedom, surely, that is incompatible with private property.
PETER: Yes, but we need to remember that the abolition of private property
does not necessarily lead to the abolition of capital. We need to examine
the direct relation between the worker and production. Here, our sole
emphasis should not be on the abolition of private property, which is the
product of alienated labor; it must be on the abolition of alienated labor
itself.
Marx gave us some clues as to how transcend alienation, ideas that he
developed from Hegel's concept of second or absolute negativity, or "the
negation of the negation." Marx engaged in a materialist rereading of
Hegel. In his work, the abolition of private property constitutes the first
negation. The second is the negation of the negation of private property.
This refers to a self-reflected negativity, the basis for a positive
humanism.
GLENN: Absolute negativity in this sense is a creative force.
PETER: Yes. Marx rejects Hegel's idealization and dehumanization of
self-movement through double negation because this leaves untouched
alienation in the world of labor-capital relations. Marx sees this absolute
negativity as objective movement and the creative force of history.
Absolute negativity in this instance becomes a constitutive feature of a
self-critical social revolution that, in turn, forms the basis of permanent
revolution.
Hudis raises a number of difficult questions with respect to developing a
project that moves beyond controlling the labor process. It is a project
that is directed at abolishing capital through the creation of freely
associated labor: the creation of a social universe not parallel to the
universe of capital (whose substance is value) is the challenge here. The
form that this society will take is that which has been suppressed within
the social universe of capital: socialism, a society based not on value but
on the fulfillment of human need.
For Dunayevskaya, absolute negativity entails more than economic struggle
but the liberation of humanity from class society. This is necessarily a
political and a revolutionary struggle and not only an economic one.
This particular insight is what, for me, signals the fecundating power of
Dunayevskaya's Marxist-Humanism--the recognition that Marx isn't talking
about class relations only but human relations.
Critical pedagogy is too preoccupied with making changes within civil
society or the bourgeois public sphere, where students are reduced to test
scores and their behavior is codified in relation to civic norms. Marx
urged us to push beyond this crude type of materialism that fails to
comprehend humanity's sensuous nature and regards humans only as statistics
or averaged out modes of behavior.
We need to move towards a new social humanity. This takes us well beyond
civil society. We need to work towards the goal of becoming associated
producers, working under conditions that will advance human nature, where
the measure of wealth is not labor-time but solidarity, creativity, and the
full development of human capacities. This can only occur outside the
social universe of capital.
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