Revolutionary critical pedagogy

Abstract

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, 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.