Opposing Bush’s
“war on terror” with
a humanist vision
Review by Spyros Themelis
The pro-Bush hacks in the US establishment love to hate educationalist Peter McLaren. He advocates Marxist ideas, has close links with Latin American progressive movements and champions people of colour. He is also well known as a critical pedagogue whose mission it is to encourage students and educators to challenge the received wisdoms and the ideologies of the status quo.
Undeterred by attempts to witch-hunt him and other anti-Bush academics, McLaren has joined with Nathalia Jaramillo in writing a new book that proposes that the United States and capitalist society at large are experiencing a crisis of global capitalism. The authors see their work integral to a political project that aims to “make the pedagogical more politically informed, the political more pedagogically critical”. They see the role of critical revolutionary educators as working with their students to develop revolutionary consciousness in order to challenge capitalism. Educators can build collective action that will resist the brutality of capitalism and work towards the abolition of the separation between the labourer and the product of her and his labour.
Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq are emblematic of the global crisis, they argue, as they expose the conditions of contemporary neo-liberalism, the logic and mechanisms of global capitalism and its effects on the oppressed and marginalised of the world. They go on to offer an alternative to global capitalist domination and a way out of this crisis. They see this as a utopia, difficult to realise, but nevertheless worth struggling for – the utopia of socialism.
Besides, there is also another war that is not waged against US enemy-states but against the working class, people of colour and women. This is demonstrated by the intimidating treatment of the Iraqi people by the American administration and pro-government propaganda, which resembles the treatment of communists in the McCarthy era. But critique of the wrongdoings of the Bush administration is only part of the authors’ endeavour: the other, bigger and bolder one is to advance a coherent and balanced alternative. This leads to the question of how to organise resistance and improve the struggle for social justice (the “politics of organisation”) – one of the most analytical parts of the book, which deserves serious consideration.
McLaren and Jaramillo point to what they see as a pseudo-opposition between the state and the market and calls for its abolition. They believe that this would allow us to adopt “an alternative vision of human sociality, one that operates outside the social universe of capital” and goes beyond the market and the state. In other words, class struggle does not have to be limited to within the state although the state remains a “relevant arena for contestation” but it has to be internationalised.
The authors with
Aleida Guevara March, |
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While not being predetermined (though an idea of the direction is necessary), this struggle then can take two different forms: on the one hand, working from within the state in order to shift the ownership of production, trade and credit to meet the requirements of those who are most in need. The other possible form is a bottom-up transformation, in a way that seems to be happening in Venezuela (the Bolivarian Circles). This section includes an insightful analysis of democracy, which the authors suggest should be focused not on growth per se but on needs of the community. Here one would like the authors to expand on the nature of these needs and how tensions generated by differential needs would be resolved in a socialist alternative.
In their discussion of educational policies in the US (especially the No Child Left Behind Act) McLaren and Jaramillo expose the neo-liberal ideology of imperialism. They believe that it paves the way for the subordination of education to capital and the free market, through privatisation, increased regulation and control, emphasis on market-valued skills, the penetration of the religious right into schools and enforced military recruitment of children at state schools – in other words, the poor. The antidote to the attempts by the US government educational policy agenda to create a neo-liberal citizenship is resistance to the marketisation and privatisation of schooling, which can be materialised by grassroots education movements. Critical educators have a central role to play in these movements as their critical revolutionary pedagogy can challenge the location of the subject of labor in relationship to the ownership of the means of production. The action of critical citizens in order to shape a world free of exploitation is crucial here. These challenges should not be seen as local but transational, as they embrace all the capital-dominated worlds.
The authors explain why they have adopted the term revolutionary critical pedagogy, borrowed from the British Marxist Paula Allman. They view it as a means to reclaim public life which they describe as “under the relentless assault of the corporatisation and privatisation of the life world, including the corporate-academic complex”. Notions of citizenship are explored in relation to Latino/a education in the US and there is a discussion of the relationship between race, class and gender. Though McLaren and Jaramillo accept all three are significant for a balanced understanding of the contemporary world, they argue that “class most often sustains the conditions that produce and reproduce the other antagonisms…[and it] creates the conditions of their possibility”. They provide examples of popular education movements from Latin America that have had great success in lifting people out of illiteracy and linking many of them to the labour market. The authors use this as an example that could lead to the development of a “philosophy of praxis”, as a means towards “dialectical self-reflexivity” in everyday struggle, through a “politics of refusal and transformation”.
They believe that our understanding of things cannot be achieved outside interventions in a materially existing world, and that our theories are in a dialectical relationship with the facts that surround us and which are socially and historically produced. The existence of hierarchy and inequalities that are innate in capitalism can only be challenged through ‘dialectical praxis’, which is closely related to action in and on the world. In this kind of materialist dialectics that is rooted in action, contradictions need to be located in the historical struggle over the means and relations of production.
The war on Iraq is viewed as driven by economic needs and the violations of international law (UN Constitution, Geneva Convention) are outlined. The main argument the authors advance is that “the United States is out to weaken and cheapen labour in order to compensate for a major loss of profits and dramatic increase in debts over the last several decades”. They underscore the denigration of democracy through its increased association with the free market. To dare the alternative, that is a socialist economy, is presented by its opponents as a threat to democracy and thus destabilising to capitalism.
They take the Bush regime to task for its consolidation of an empire that no longer relies on territorial expansion but rather on “indirect methods of domination through the creation of local surrogates and by relying on economic compulsion”. Unravelling the conservative right and Bush’s ideological principles, which are guided by fervent religious zeal, further advances the demystification of the moral values that sustain the US domination. For Christianity in the US is not solely a spiritual and strictly personal business but it has taken a political expression. Thus, Christian fundamentalism (or Islamic fundamentalism, for that matter) can become employed – wittingly or unwittingly – by a national leader as an ideological cover and alibi for laying waste to vast numbers of enemies, often depicted as barbaric or evil.
If their forecast for the future seems rather bleak, McLaren and Jaramillo nonetheless believe that there is hope as long as there is an alternative: a struggle that challenges the formal structure of the capitalist system and the ownership of the means of production that will enable the transformation of the social relations of production and will not just “humanise” capitalism. This is grounded in the materialist dialectics of a humanist-Marxist framework, which is part of a project of action in and on the world. This can be achieved through an “intergenerational, multi-racial, gender-balanced, transnational and anti-imperialist social movement”.
With this book, McLaren and Jaramillo have built on his earlier work and have made it more accessible to a wider readership. This is not a book merely about theory: hopefully it will inspire others to take action to change the world.
Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism by Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo, Sense Publishers. US$49, €45. Readers in low-income countries can obtain e-copies by contacting the publishers.
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