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Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory

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These two developments were mutually reinforcing; the ‘death of Marxism’ seemed to justify, or validate, a movement toward postmodernism, which at least seemed to have a future. — location: 482 ^ref-48458

Post-modern thinking, therefore, yields no dangerous consequences for informing actions and struggles that threaten to practically disrupt the constitution of capitalist society, as this is left unexplored; capitalism remains an enigma safe from any amount of postmodern question-posing and deconstruction. — location: 642 ^ref-18571

it naturalizes the exploitation of the world’s poor and powerless, reducing workers to the market price of their sweat and blood. — location: 972 ^ref-5871

Although liberalism lived up to its name by expanding the welfare state after the Second World War, it nevertheless has become more intimately associated with capitalism than with democracy’s rule of the majority. — location: 1017 ^ref-56693

Computer technology has not reduced the need for physical labor (someone had to build the polished steel information cathedrals of Silicon Valley that house the new dot.com billionaires). Rather, computer technology has led to an automation of labor, making it more productive and efficient while at the same time cheapening it. — location: 1032 ^ref-7533

We refuse to treat the economy as a thing and endow it with democratic agency. After Marx, we view the economy as a social relation and not a natural entity. Capitalism is not a natural, self-regulating system but rather one overburdened by exploitation, the quest of endless accumulation, and class conflict. — location: 1039 ^ref-32703

Capital is a social relation of abstract value. It is also a value-relation because the substance of value is abstract labor. Because it is a repository of surplus value, capital is driven toward an endless accumulation of value by transforming concrete labor into abstract, undifferentiated labor. The prime objective of capital is to have command over objectified labor. — location: 1043 ^ref-18633

Capital is a social relation which relies on the unequal property relations existing between individuals and social groups. — location: 1049 ^ref-56501

Capital is a social relation. It is the right to profit from the labor of others—the right to a kind of private taxation. It is the right to claim ownership of social assets and the right to exclude others from means of livelihood. So long as capitalist property relations prevail, wealthowners will decide who prospers and who does not, but the wealth they control was not created by capital. — location: 1053 ^ref-15462

postmodern educators have been hampered by a number of factors: (a) by their tacit—and often overt—acceptance of a market economy; (b) their joining in the chorus of post-Marxists celebrating the death of universalism and grand narratives; (c) their impatience to strike a novel posture in the theater of educational transgression; (d) their predilection for allowing their politics to be distracted by their postcolonial cultural performances of dissent; and (e) by their failure to recognize that, in the words of Robin D. G. Kelley, “We are hardly in a ‘postcolonial’ moment. — location: 1069 ^ref-16913

within postmodern theory, the “assumption of the deimperialism of the center is an act of concealed imperialism.” — location: 1075 ^ref-49301

the postmodern Left remains hostage to its own strategic ambivalence about capital. — location: 1081 ^ref-4987

Not only have postmodern theorists been woefully remiss in explaining how cultural representations and formations are indentured to capitalism, they have often confused socialism with, at worse, the history of Stalinism, and, at best, the welfare state reformism often associated with Scandinavian countries such as Denmark and Sweden. — location: 1081 ^ref-14903

when read sharply against Guevarian challenges to imperialism and Marxist challenges to social relations of production and global regimes of capitalist exploitation, postmodernist theory frequently collapses into a form of toothless liberalism and airbrushed insurgency. — location: 1092 ^ref-47226

how does the semiotic warfare of the postmodern or postcolonial critic reinscribe, repropose, and recohere capitalist social relations of production through decentering and rerouting cultural representations? — location: 1101 ^ref-47332

We don’t want to deny the crimes against humanity committed by regimes claiming to be Marxist, to ignore the problems associated with Eastern and European Communist parties in their unregenerate Stalinist aspects, or to defend Marxism’s recidivistic retreat into bureaucratic authoritarianism, dogmatism, and economic determinism. Nor do we wish to defend what Eagleton calls “the long tragedy of class-society,” corporate governance, the ill-gotten gains of financial profiteers and speculators, and the history of imperialism and international terrorism committed by Western “democracies.” — location: 1125 ^ref-63885

We admit that Marxist theory may be out of fashion (in the United States at least) but it still has a full tank of conceptual fuel for the kind of analysis urgently needed at this point in the history of capitalism. — location: 1131 ^ref-10098

Marx opposed centralized state control of the economy (he called those who advocated it “crude and unthinking communists”); he passionately defended freedom of the press (he made his debut as a radical journalist espousing it); and he ridiculed the notion that a small “vanguard” of revolutionaries could successfully restructure society without the democratic consent of its citizens. — location: 1136 ^ref-50848

Marxist criticism uncoils the political economy of texts by remapping and rethinking systems of signification in relation to the material and historical practices that produce them, thus valorizing the “structural endurance of histories” over the “contingent moment.” — location: 1160 ^ref-34646

The shift toward a postmodernism layered with a thin veneer of cultural Marxism, scaffolded by identity politics and postsocialist ideology, sprayed by aerosol terms such as ‘difference’ and ‘indeterminacy, and dipped in the gurgling foam of jacuzzi socialism and window-dressing democracy, has witnessed the categories of cultural domination and oppression replace those of class exploitation and imperialism as capitalism’s reigning antagonisms.35 At the same time, a politics of representation has deftly outflanked the issue of socioeconomic redistribution. — location: 1164 ^ref-47077

postmodern theory has failed to provide an effective counterstrategy to the spread of neoliberal ideology that currently holds educational policy and practice in its thrall. — location: 1173 ^ref-43950

We believe that Marxist analysis should serve as an axiomatic tool for contesting current social relations linked to the globalization of capital and the neoliberal education policies that follow in its wake. — location: 1182 ^ref-58190

We believe that a critical reflexive Marxist theory—undergirded by the categorical imperative of striving to overthrow all social conditions in which human beings are exploited and oppressed—can prove foundational in the development of current educational research traditions, as well as pedagogies of liberation. — location: 1187 ^ref-41457

postmodern politics attempts (a) to separate culture from ideology, (b) to employ culture as a construct that diminishes the centrality of class, (c) to insert a neoliberal political system of intelligibility and policy agenda, (d) to perpetuate the belief in the ultimate futility of the socialist project, and (e) to promote an assortment of ‘post’ concepts—such as post-structuralism, postmodernism, post-history, post-ideology-as a way of limiting the theoretical direction of inquiry and preempting socialist challenges to new objective realities brought about by the globalization of capital. — location: 1198 ^ref-26022

While postmodern politics tends to focus on particular forms of oppression, the irrefragable power of Marxist theory resides in its ability to reveal how all forms of social oppression under capitalism are mutually interconnected. — location: 1217 ^ref-880

It is a cardinal position in postmodernism to place under suspicion master narratives, universalism and objectivity, on the grounds that they are particular epistemological and moral discourses camouflaged under the guise of universal discourses. — location: 1221 ^ref-46237

Postmodernists additionally dismiss the Enlightenment’s claim and appeal to universalism by associating it with European imperialism and colonialism which, in their view, aided the Spanish, Portuguese, and British conquest of the ‘New World.’ However, history demonstrates that prior empires did not rely on specific universal discourses similar to the Enlightenment ideas to justify their atrocities, genocide, and territorial conquest. On the contrary, Enlightenment thinkers frequently stressed the significance of other cultures’ moral and ethical commitments by comparing and contrasting them to their own European origins. — location: 1225 ^ref-14242

Marxists are strongly inclined to see social contradictions as anchored in the objective nature of everyday life; they are part of the structural determinations of the social. 43 In rejecting dialectical thought, and in abandoning the notion that capitalist exploitation is linked to the law of value and the extraction of surplus value, Laclau and Mouffe reduce exploitation to a linguistic process in a purely semantic universe. Yet the oppressed know differently. For them, exploitation takes place in a concrete fashion, in the bowels of everyday contradictions that expel relations of equality. — location: 1234 ^ref-7550

Capitalism can survive antiracist and antisexist practices because it is a social system based on economic exploitation and the ownership of private property. — location: 1269 ^ref-16137

We believe that in its failure to recognize capitalism as a fundamental determinant of social oppression, and in its focus on racism, sexism, and homophobia delinked from their attachment to White patriarchal epistemologies, the law of value, and the international division of labor, identity politics falls prey to a facile form of culturalism. — location: 1271 ^ref-814

certain contexts arise in which identity politics tends to hamper and weaken working-class struggles. In some instances, for example, by blaming only Whites for the oppression of Blacks, men for the oppression of women, and heterosexuality for the oppression of gays and lesbians, identity politics fails to situate White racializing and racist practices, as well as patriarchal and heteronormative practices, as conjunctional practices within the wider context of capitalist relations of exploitation. — location: 1274 ^ref-26072

The accusation of some postmodernists that classical Marxism leaves virtually untroubled the issue of gender ignores the contributions of Marxist feminists and multiculturalists, not to mention Marxist revolutionaries. — location: 1277 ^ref-23421

Some postmodern feminists have argued that classical Marxism is shrouded in claims to universal truth and has overlooked the specificity of women’s labor. They assert that historical materialism is reductive because it reduces all types of oppression into class exploitation, ignoring racism, sexism, and homophobia. Carol Stabile responds by describing this attack on Marxism as underwritten by what she calls “theoretical essentialism.” — location: 1286 ^ref-28264

“despite the existence of the largest, most influential and vociferous feminist movement in the world, it is US women who have seen least overall change in the relative disadvantages of their sex, compared to other Western democracies.” — location: 1302 ^ref-64811

identity politics by itself “can offer little more than enjoyment of an endless game of self-expression played out on the great board of Identity.” — location: 1308 ^ref-33783

Racism occurs when the characteristics which justify discrimination are held to be inherent in the oppressed group. — location: 1319 ^ref-43914

Racism is thus no mere epiphenomenon of a determinant social process, but a fundamental component of that process. — location: 1321 ^ref-21404

Callinicos points outs three main conditions for the existence of racism as outlined by Marx: economic competition between workers; the appeal of racist ideology to white workers; and efforts of the capitalist class to establish and maintain racial divisions among workers. — location: 1322 ^ref-15789

racial hostility in the United States did not antecede the founding of the plantocracy in seventeenth-century Virginia. — location: 1324 ^ref-6145

the invention of race, racism, and whiteness in the United States was hastened by the interaction between the slave market and the legislation of sexuality within the corporate structure of the colony. — location: 1327 ^ref-50468

The ‘purity condition’ of English women was a necessary ideological condition for establishing the social reality of the white race. Martinot also points out that all women were reduced to productive resources, as the corporate structure of the colony was reproduced in all personal affairs and interactions. — location: 1332 ^ref-45079

The plantocracy responded by devising ways of turning the Africans and the English bond-laborers against each other through ‘policing’ privileges granted to the English. In addition, the plantocracy launched campaigns to demonize and bestialize Africans and passed laws against miscegenation. — location: 1338 ^ref-15882

Poor white laborers were offered membership in the control stratum for the subalterned nonwhite labor force. — location: 1344 ^ref-1281

Whiteness and white supremacy did not evolve out of race relations, but were themselves the sociopolitical relations that brought race into existence. — location: 1350 ^ref-25052

Indeed, if whiteness can engender itself as such only by racializing others, it can only be understood as a social relation, a social hierarchy of racialized identities. — location: 1351 ^ref-23856

Racism and white supremacy were not invented to “divide and rule” the working class, within an existing class structure, but to serve as the primary mode of organizing the structure of labor itself. Racism is the very name of the process whereby a class structure itself was produced. — location: 1355 ^ref-18131

The plantocracy created the relation between the white socioeconomy and those nonwhite peoples who existed on its periphery or margins. Here, white corporate society functioned as the ruling class with respect to the nonwhite people that it exploited. The second system was the white economy itself, whose principle of cohesion and allegiance was racialization. Martinot notes that “the first economy conditions the integrity of the white economy as a corporate society and culture.” — location: 1364 ^ref-7934

“Marxism has never extended itself beyond trade union consciousness because it was never able to fathom the structure of white solidarity by which the white working class was constructed.” — location: 1373 ^ref-2389

Thus, “the very condition for working-class unity in the United States is the condition for its disunity.” — location: 1376 ^ref-46849

This no doubt goes a long way in explaining why, for instance, the United States labor movement does not call for solidarity with Mexican workers against NAFTA, but remains in solidarity with the U.S. business/corporate order even as it protests unfair labor practices. — location: 1377 ^ref-39167

We think it is important to connect racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression to the mode of production and the historically specific political economies of capitalist exploitation, since the fundamental axis of systematic oppression is linked to the appropriation of labor power of the many by the few and its conversion into private property. — location: 1379 ^ref-7082

The goal of Marxism is to abolish class society so that every individual—regardless of age, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity—enjoys the material resources necessary to develop his or her differences and enhance the creative capacities denied to them by capitalism. — location: 1394 ^ref-41326

it is important not to confuse race or gender with social class. Social class is not the same as gender or race, on the grounds that it is a necessary feature of capitalist society. — location: 1406 ^ref-4854

Class, therefore, is different if you maintain this broad definition, that is, the ‘working class’ is the vast majority pressed into selling their labor powers. — location: 1411 ^ref-30845

Although we argue that class oppression often grounds or anchors other forms of oppression linked to identity politics, we want to underscore the point that, to a large extent, all forms of oppression are important and dialectically interactive with each other. — location: 1418 ^ref-7655

the primary contradiction of class society: the tension between labor and capital. — location: 1420 ^ref-37587

the shift from politicizing culture to culturalizing politics demonstrates the bankruptcy of the Left and progressives who have altogether abandoned the Enlightenment project. — location: 1425 ^ref-13656

Terry Eagleton maintains that we should emphasize the politics of culture rather than cultural politics since “politics are the conditions of which culture is the product.” — location: 1431 ^ref-25461

Cultural practices become political under certain historical conditions and as a result of antagonisms between social forces. — location: 1435 ^ref-57738

Amin emphasizes that postmodernism “expresses capitulation to the demands of capitalist political economy in its current phase, in the hope—the utopian hope—of ‘humanely’ managing the system.” — location: 1442 ^ref-18886

We still live within monopoly capitalism or late capitalism, and internationally the struggle between capital and labor as part of the practice of imperialism has not seen a qualitative change or shift in direction. — location: 1491 ^ref-63304

we still regard the working class as the privileged agent for fundamental social change with the state still serving as the central target of the revolutionary struggle of the masses. This is because the state is still the main agent of globalization, in that it continues to maintain the conditions of accumulation, undertakes a rigid disciplining of the labor force, flexibly enhances the mobility of capital while ruthlessly suppressing the mobility of labor, and serves as a vehicle for viciously repressing social movements through the state apparatuses of the police, the military, the judicial system, etc. — location: 1493 ^ref-29578

new social movements mistakenly believing that industrial production has declined in relevance, engage in a self-limiting radicalization of the public sphere, largely struggle on behalf of bourgeois rights for the petty-bourgeoisie, fail to consider the state as a unitary agent of intervention and action in promoting structural reform, and eschew the goal of revolutionary Marxists of taking over the state and the economy. — location: 1501 ^ref-31064

Marxist social theory’s conception of the dynamic and organic nature of social relations of production under capitalism is more convincing than the triumphalistic, self-congratulatory and self-centered effusions associated with the neoliberal ideologues claiming the ‘end of Marxism.’ — location: 1522 ^ref-62641

History undoubtedly will point us further in the direction of a socialist future but whether we will have the will and the courage to bring it about is quite another story. Capitalism doesn’t come equipped with air bags. On its collision course with history, vast numbers of human fatalities are a certainty. — location: 1554 ^ref-55633

Unfortunately, in the rush to poststructuralism and postmodernism and in the supposed rejection of ‘the’ Enlightenment project, many of us may have forgotten how very powerful the structural dynamics are in which we participate. In the process, cynical detachment often replaces our capacity to be angry. — location: 1799 ^ref-7850

it is the former language—of bureaucracy, of the colonization of all of our lives by the metaphors of markets, profit, and the accountant’s bottom line, and so on—that circulates more widely. It leads to what can only be called a loss of memory, an assumption that such approaches were and are neutral technical instrumentalities that if left alone will ultimately solve all of our problems in schools and the larger society (on the terms of dominant groups, of course). — location: 1867 ^ref-30929

“Where the origin of social arrangements in political, cultural, and moral choices has disappeared or has come to appear as a neutral technical matter ... one faces a situation of cultural and political hegemony.” — location: 1874 ^ref-63554

No bureaucracy can function unless those subject to it adopt specific attitudes, habits, beliefs, and orientations; attitudes toward authority, habits of punctuality, regularity, and consistency, beliefs about the abstract nature and legitimacy of authority and expertise: orientations to rules and procedures. These attitudes, habits, beliefs, and orientations do not spring into existence out of technical necessity; they are the products of complex and protracted conflicts. — location: 1878 ^ref-25176

for political, economic, and cultural leadership to be successful, those who speak for the most powerful groups in society must engage in serious “intellectual work.” — location: 1889 ^ref-12420

anything that diminishes our understanding of the economic and ideological context within which such policies are situated also needs to be very carefully thought through. — location: 1902 ^ref-39382

Unleashing the ‘free market’ will be the solution. If the poor still are poor after this society is radically transformed around ‘the private’ then we’ll know that they got poor the old-fashioned way; they earned it. If it weren’t so damaging a set of policies, the assertions would be laughable. — location: 1907 ^ref-62098

The market offers a powerful response to a whole set of technical, managerial, and ideological problems. It appears to give power to all parents, while systematically advantaging some and disadvantaging others, and effectively reproducing the classic lines of the social and technical division of labour. It plays its part in the reformulation generalized.... And it serves to generalize the commodity form, a basic building brick of capitalist culture and subjectivity. — location: 1910 ^ref-23394

it is even more important to remember not to try to squeeze everything into being simply a mere reflection of economic relations for conceptual and political reasons. — location: 1935 ^ref-26748

every innovation, new body, tribunal or commission originates either directly or at one removed from working class resistance to the formal conditions of its life. Just as machinery is the product of labour which then confronts its producer as an alien force, so [training] administration is the appropriation of the revolutionary will by the state, and its transformation into a counterrevolutionary force. — location: 4048 ^ref-33573

the social relationships of education—the relationships between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and students and their work—replicate the hierarchical division of labour.... By attuning young people to a set of social relationships similar to those of the work place, schooling attempts to gear the development of personal needs to its requirements.... — location: 4636 ^ref-46920

Pupils in predominantly working-class secondary schools appear to be given many more time-consuming reading and writing tasks than children in middle-class schools, and have less opportunity for classroom discussions. — location: 4704 ^ref-64363

There is overwhelming evidence that the increase in selection within education systems, and the accompanying increased competitive marketization in education through policies of ‘diversity in schooling,’ including ‘parental choice,’ have increased the hierarchical nature of schooling. — location: 4741 ^ref-56990

the “educational system is a site of struggle, exemplifying the tension between those who wish to transform it as part of a revolutionary process and those for whom the school is largely an agency of social reproduction and control.” — location: 4809 ^ref-40016

Through the hidden curriculum, via the expectations of teachers and other school staff and by the respective roles of staff in the schools, schooling reflects and reinforces the social class hierarchy of the wider society. — location: 4834 ^ref-4267

Schools, and further and higher education, can and should be arenas for the encouragement of critical thought, where young people engage with a number of ways of interpreting the world, not just the dominant forms. — location: 4837 ^ref-30967

uncontested; if, for example, possible alternative systems, such as socialism (e.g., ‘state interventionist’ on the one hand, and ‘democratic workers’ control’ on the other) are not fully addressed, then school students are being denied an effective, meaningful choice, while alternative social, political and economic systems are being, in effect, hidden from history. All students have a right to know that market capitalism is simply one way, albeit the globally dominant one, of running economies, nationally and globally. — location: 4840 ^ref-2256

This personalizing of racism, and the racism awareness training (RAT) classes that were set up to counter it, ended up by instilling guilt in white people and hampering anti-racist action. — location: 5309 ^ref-7513

and in its embrace of the particular and the relative, postmodernism embodies the same notions of difference as are contained in nineteenth-century Romantic racial theories.” — location: 5388 ^ref-53691

“no struggle against racism or any kind of collective oppression is possible without some concept of universality.” — location: 5398 ^ref-58399

by means of echoliac rhetorical proclamations that bind us together as one nation indivisible, many cling only to the familiar or the promise thereof, fearful that all acts of knowing who we are sooner or later become acts of destroying what we have become. To know who we are is, after all, to recognize the slack-jawed, low intensity democracy despoiled by the lesions of greed that now pockmark the unconquerable visage of the holiest of U.S. monuments, the Statue of Liberty. It is also to acknowledge the United States’ total propinquity with inventing ways of exploiting the wealth of the globe and razing the fragile infrastructures of the most poor and powerless of nations. — location: 6362 ^ref-30882

Capitalists and the wealthy accumulated wealth with such success during the 1980s largely because the state intervened directly to place money in their hands—enabling them to profit from their own business failure through lucrative bailouts, offering them massive tax breaks which played no small part in the recovery of corporate balance sheets, and providing them with an unprecedented array of other politically constituted opportunities to get richer faster through fiscal, monetary, and deregulation policies—all at the expense of the great mass of the population. — location: 6406 ^ref-39364

Capitalism is a system without a soul, without humanity. It tries to reduce every human activity to market profitability. It has no loyalty to democracy, family values, culture, Judeo-Christian ethics, ordinary folks, or any of the other shibboleths mouthed by its public relations representatives on special occasions. It has no loyalty to any nation; its only loyalty is to its own system of capital accumulation. It is not dedicated to ‘serving the community;’ it serves only itself, extracting all it can from the many so that it might give all it can to the few. — location: 6423 ^ref-38130

It is rather amusing to see managerial types who dismiss Marxism as unduly deterministic proffering this rather vulgar absolute kind of determinism. Moreover, the social design they seek to defend with this argument, namely the market-based management of the world system, is utopian in the worst sense of the term, a reactionary, criminal utopia, doomed in any case to fall apart under the pressure, of its own highly explosive charge. — location: 6493 ^ref-26278

Modernity is still unfinished, and it remains so as long as the human race continues to exist. Currently, the fundamental obstacle setting its limits is still defined by the social relationships specific to capitalism. What the postmodernists refuse to see is that modernity can progress further only by going beyond capitalism. — location: 6599 ^ref-6903

general. We are interested in finding common ground between cultural criticism and the movement for a transformation of productive relations. — location: 6616 ^ref-26734

postmodernism lacks adequate tools to answer the radical right ... the tools of postmodernism produce only a more volatile version of the radical right.... Postmodernism cuts the connection between human intention and social outcome. While for the radical right the incompleteness of our knowledge means that society is the outcome of the blindfold and therefore haphazard activities of the individual, for the postmodern theorist, society is an equally haphazard plethora of solipsistic statements of various sorts. — location: 6659 ^ref-37243

The development of world capitalism as an imperializing force, as a means of subjugating labor, as a system of unequal and combined development, as a means of superexploi-tation and the repression of democratic aspirations, needs more than monadic local efforts at improving resource allocation and warning the public against excessive consumptive practices. — location: 6672 ^ref-46109

socialism must assume many different forms. — location: 7450 ^ref-23948