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Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Since the Mid-1990S, the Focus Of Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Since the mid-1990s, the focus of my work has shifted discernibly, if not dramatically, from a preoccupation with poststructuralist analyses of popular culture, in which I attempted to deploy contrapuntally critical pedagogy, neo- Marxist critique and cultural analysis, to a revolutionary Marxist humanist perspective. My focus shifted away from the politics of representation and its affiliative liaison with identity production and turned towards the role of finance capital and the social relations of production. Against a utopian theory of entrepreneurial individuality and agency backed by a voluntarism unburdened by history, I came to see the necessity of transforming the very structures of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy by means of a pedagogical praxis guided by the revolutionary knowledges of historical materialism. In so doing, questions of patriarchal and sexist ideology are connected to their material origins—of social labor—that emphasize the relations between the sexes and how the distribution of labor in capitalist economies have generated the alienating conditions in which men and women relate to themselves and to one another (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, 2008). I locate my work within what I take to be the fundamental condition of late modernity—a brutal and systematic extraction of surplus value from proletarianized regions of the world (usually decaying in a climate of bourgeois- comprador nationalism) culminating in a condition of substantive inequality and an egregiously unequal division of labor—a condition that is structurally inescapable under the regime of capital. Through the generalization of exchange- values mediated by the machinations of capital accumulation on a global scale, this regressive situation has spawned alienated lifeworlds festering in the swamp of reification and the commodification of everyday life. Since my shift in focus, I have come to view the assertion of many poststructuralists—that Marxism constitutes a totalizing pressuring of meaning into semiotic foreclosure, placing an overlay of determinism on the free interplay of cultural discourses with their free-floating auto-intelligibilities, their aleatory and indeterminable play of the sign, and turning the jazz of signification into a military march of pre-ordained procrustean meanings—as an exclusion of causality from the domain of history by replacing it with difference and play. In effect, by situating the social as a contingent totality, the avant-garde politics of representation articulated by the poststructuralists become part of a larger ensemble of textual reading practices that obscure the production practices of capitalism (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, 2008). I also had serious problems with what progressive educators were describing as the struggle for democracy in the public sphere because so much of this discourse involved pedagogically fostering a respect for the values of democratic citizenship and appealing to moral sentiments and critical reasoning. Of course, this is bound to fail because it rests on an appeal to the individual’s consciousness—a move that does little to parry the most devastating effects of capital and is ineffective in bringing about capital’s inanation. As Istvan Meszaros (2008) notes, an appeal to individual consciousness ultimately remains insufficient because “it avoids the social causes of the denounced negative symptoms” (p. 341). He adds that “what is absolutely excluded is the possibility of changing the structural determinations of the established social order that produce and reproduce the destructive effects and consequences” (p. 341). I take the position that the worker is the producing subject of capitalist society and the capitalist is the pseudo-subject. As Meszaros explains: Notwithstanding the fetishistic mystifications of the capital system, the real producing subject is the worker; the capitalist as the presumed controlling subject —who is in fact firmly controlled through the necessarily prevailing structural imperatives of the established order—can only be a usurping pseudo subject . Consequently, only the actually producing subject, labor, can acquire the feasible and productively viable regulatory consciousness under the historical conditions of our time. (p. 346) It is the social relations of labor that determines a person’s class location, not the opportunities for engorging in consumptive practices. Those who have to sell their labor power to earn a living (i.e., those who produce the profit for the capitalist) are part of one class. Those who purchase human labor and take the profit away from labor are part of another class (Ebert and Zavarzadeh, 2008). Subsequently, the market is distributing the already available wealth. While, for instance, the stock market may seem to produce wealth, it is really just redistributing the wealth produced by the labor of the workers. Profit does not come from market relations (buying low and selling high), but from human labor power. In this, I follow Marx’s focus on the development of human productive forces—a very complex process that is historically related to the material conditions of production and the class struggle. The profound incompatibility between the forces and relations of production produces tremendous social conflict. John Bellamy Foster (1996) vividly captures this dilemma in the following description: Every given stage of development of the productive forces of society —that is, of the human species, and of the division of labor —is bound up historically with certain social relations of production, particularly class relations. Once a particular form of class domination comes into existence as a result of this complex process of historical development, the dominant element in the relations attempts to freeze it into place, and the existing society loses its progressive character. Despite changes in the material conditions of production, any ruling class will seek to preserve its rule at all cost, thus becoming a fetter on further social and economic development. The state, law, religion, and the entire realm of ideas, to the extent that they represent the overarching interests in society and are conditioned by the underlying set of socioeconomic relations, will all be enlisted for the purpose of defending the status quo and of patching up society’s contradictions. (p. 21) In the field of education, Marxism’s protean focus on proletarian self- activity and the self-organization of the popular majorities are anathema to much of the work that falls under the dubious classification of social justice education. Although well meaning progressive educators might be willing to criticize the manner in which humans are turned into dead objects (i.e., what Marxists refer to as fetishized commodities), they are often loathe to consider the fact that within capitalist society, all value originates in the sphere of production and a main role of schools is to serve as agents or functionaries of capital. Furthermore, these educators fail to understand that education is more reproductive of an exploitative social order than a constitutive challenge to it precisely because it rests on the foundations of capitalist exchange value. What is necessary, as Glenn Rikowski (2007) argues, is for the inequalities of labor-power quality generated within the capitalist labor process to undergo re-equalization to the socially average level in order to attain the equalization of labor-power values that are the foundation of social justice in capitalism . The unmeasured condemnation and broadside assaults on Marx by the academy in general and education in particular treats Marxism as a chthonic adventure, akin to what Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale (2009) refers to as “a form of ideological Neanderthalism, an antediluvian memory invoked by those trapped in the mental furniture of a bygone era” (p. 23). The soi-dissant scholars who would so vigorously dismiss Marxist theory appear to me to be cut from the same cloth as those knowledge producers whom E. P. Thompson called “the bourgeois lumpen-intelligensia aspirant intellectuals, whose amateurish intellectual preparation disarms them before manifest absurdities and elementary philosophical blunders…while many of them would like to be ‘revolutionaries’, they are themselves the products of a particular ‘conjuncture’ which has broken the circuits between intellectuality and practical experience…and hence they are able to perform imaginary revolutionary psycho-dramas (in which each outbids the other in adopting ferocious verbal postures) while falling back upon a very old tradition of bourgeois elitism” (as cited in Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, 2009, p. 27). Their retrograde, opportunistic, and banalizing politics situates itself as a culture of liberal compassion and a polyglot cosmopolitanism that effectively masquerades an unwillingness to comprehend neocolonialism and to ignore the contradictions inherent in the system of commodity production and its manifold mediations of our concrete quotidian existence. Further, it signifies a refusal to consider uneven and combined development, a structured silence and motivated amnesia surrounding the urgent task of historicizing power relations in concrete material conditions of production and reproduction. There exists a grand denial of responsibility to disclaim the limitations of bourgeois ethics in the project of social transformation and a studied reluctance to engage the concrete multilayered totality of everyday life (read as a
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