Critical Pedagogy Against Capitalist Schooling Towards a Socialist Alternative. an Interview With...

Critical Pedagogy Against Capitalist Schooling:Towards a Socialist Alternative

An Interview with

Peter McLarenby Jose María Barroso Tristán

"Together, we can turn possible futures intotangible realities that can liberate us from thechains that make us as much as we make them.We have the power to break our chains."

http://www.globaleducationmagazine.com/critical-pedagogy-againstcapitalist-schooling-socialist-alternative-interview-peter-mclaren

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Critical Pedagogy Against Capitalist Schooling:

Towards a Socialist Alternative.

An Interview with Peter McLaren.

Jose María Barroso Tristán: The first questionI would like to ask you is: Considering thefact that you are a critical educator, whichwould you say are the main components thatdistinguish a critical education from atraditional one?

Peter McLaren: While I am a critical educator andhave the utmost respect for the field, I do not work in thearena of what might be considered ‘conventional’ critical

pedagogy. In the field of critical education there is anentanglement of visions, locations, practices and theseunderstandably vary from individual to individual,neighborhood to neighborhood, district to district, regionto region, country to country, etc. Critical pedagogy is,after al l , part of a geopolitics of knowledge. For me, thefundamental goal of critical pedagogy is the struggle fora social ist alternative to capital ism—with capital ismunderstood as a global ecology of exploitation—and theapproach I take builds on conventional approaches tocritical pedagogy. I include in my recent work insightsfrom the “decolonial school” that contests the colonial ityof power, I include advances in critical race theory,feminist theory, and ecopedagogy, to name severalareas of interest that I feel are important. My approachto critical pedagogy is therefore radical ly heterodox—orif you prefer, fundamental ly orthodox—depending uponwhere you stand, or your positional ity. But it is safe tosay that my approach cannot be essayed by traditionall iberal efforts to reform dimensions of capital ist societythat most impact teaching and learning. There would becritical educators that would contest my own approach tocritical education, and that is part and parcel of being acritical educator, and their (frequent) opposition to myposition is not something that I condemn but engage inthe spirit of critical dialogue. Of course I ful ly agree withmany of the more accepted goals of the l iberal variantsof critical pedagogy whose arch-categories include thefol lowing—to foment dialogue, to deepen ourappreciation of public l ife, to create spaces of respectand appreciation for diversity, to encourage criticalthinking, to build cultural ly sensitive curricula, to create avibrant democratic public sphere, to try to change thehardened hearts and minds of our increasingly parasiticfinancial aristocracy, to build knowledge from theexperiences and the histories of students themselves, tomake knowledge relevant to the l ives of students, and toencourage students to theorize and make sense of theirexperiences in order to break free from the systems ofmediation that l imit their understanding of the world and

their capacity to transform it, to challenge racism,sexism, homophobia, ableism, to fight against whitesupremacy, etc. But I bel ieve that around the mid-1 980s, when corporations began to become morepowerful that some nation states, that the battle forcritical democratic citizenship became just asmokescreen for the production of consumer citizenshipand critical pedagogy as it was then conceived becamemore like a dying star about to go into a supernova stageand incinerate any hope we had for real educationaltransformation, locked as we were within a neoliberalstate that was quickly consolidating itself (and that a fewdecades later would have transformed itself into asecurity state akin to fascism). Hence I looked for anavigatable transit route beyond liberal ism in thedirection of a Marxist humanism. At the time, when thewet-sock formlessness of postmodern theory wasbecoming an unwitting companion of neoliberal ism, Iwas mocked by some in the field for returning to adiscredited Marxism. But the more our daily toi l andstruggle in the sloughs of ordinary human existence andhuman suffering increased, and the more our journeywithin in the fearful paradoxical ity of everyday lifecontrasted with the neat and seemless principles ofneoliberal logic of privatization, the more rationalMarxism sounded to me. Critical pedagogy has atransnational heritage. There is no final resting place inthe vault of the critical pedagogy pantheon, since criticalpedagogy is constantly reinventing itself to meet thechallenges of the present. The work of Freire remainscentral and we need to remember the initiatives ofpopular educators and social ist Sunday schools,l iberation theologians, schools for factory workers,social ist col lectives, and other groups in various parts ofthe world. We not only need to build a collective memoryof the field, but a shared memory. So we need to learnthe history of struggles for educational transformation asit has occurred throughout the globe. I see my role invery modest terms-to push critical pedagogy in NorthAmerica in the direction of appreciating social ism as a

PETER McLAREN is the inaugural recipient of The Social and

Economic Justice in Public Education Award by the Marxian Analysis of

Society, Schools and Education, The American Educational Research

Association, 201 2; the Central New York Peace Studies Consortium

Lifetime Achievement Award in Peace Studies; the 201 3 Award of

Achievement in Critical Studies by the Critical Studies Association

(Athens, Greece); the "Friend in Solidarity with the Struggle of Mexican

Teachers" award by the National Union of Educational Workers

(Michoacan), and the First Annual Social Justice and Upstander Ethics

in Education Award presented by the Department of Education, Antioch

University, Los Angeles. He is also the recent recipient of the Ana

Kristine Pearson Award in Equity in Education and Economy presented

by The Center of Education and Work, the University of Toronto, 201 2.

The government of Venezuela recently honored Professor McLaren with

the International Award in Critical Pedagogy, while the Universidad

Nacional Autónoma de México recognized him with the Distincion

Academica Educación, Debates e Imaginario Social. Professors

McLaren's work has been translated into 20 languages. One of his

books, Life in Schools, was chosen in 2004 as one of the 1 2 most

significant education books worldwide by an international panel

commissioned by The Moscow School of Social and Economic

Sciences and by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation.

As a political activist, he lectures worldwide and works with

revolutionary, community and educational groups around the globe.

Peter McLaren is Professor of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of

Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los

Angeles. He is also currently Distinguished Fellow in Critical Studies at

Chapman University, California.




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collective goal. And here I am not referring to theEuropean tradition alone, but to autonomous socialmovements of indigenous communities in LasAmericas and elsewhere. The revenants of criticalpedagogy wil l return to haunt us, should we forgetwhat first animated its mission, which was thestruggle against the ravages of capital ism, and tobear witness to a better future. The little maledictionsof daily political l ife over time abrade the flesh of ourhope so that we resignedly give over our agency toothers to run the engines of democracy. The popularmajorities have a pent-up cargo of vitriol aimed atthe nation’s corporate bloodsuckers: the rent-extractors, rich financiers, money-for-nothingbankers, kleptocrats, rogue traders, subprimemalefactors, neo-feudal overlords of commerceheadquartered in Wall Street, Paleol ithicdemagogues working as CEOs, and hedge fundsl ime masters, whose corporate machinations collectl ike massive gobs of rancid spittle in the melting pot ofcapital ism we call America. Those are the 99 percent,who do not control most of the country’s wealth, whohave become the victims of the great recession, andhave organized themselves as the Occupy Wall Streetmovement (and various other Occupy movements). Butthe anger directed at the banking and financeestablishment, or at the government’s bailout of theseinstitutions, while understandable, is neverthelessmisdirected. The social relations that have victimized thepoor are not simply the result of greedy bankers whoover the last few decades have decided to overreachthemselves in the squalid frenzy of market deregulation;rather, the social relations that are largely responsible forthe current economic crisis are those produced by theregime of capital ism itself. Paulo Freire would haveclearly understood this. And while the anger of the 99percent may be misdirected, this historical momentpresents itself as an opportune time to reflect uponcapital ism and to explore alternatives to it.

JMBT: Please correct me if I am wrong but Iget from your words that this issue goesbeyond every educator´s paradigm. Withoutplaying down its importance, this problem isactually rooted in nowadays neoliberal-capitalist supranational superestructure thatimposes its logic over every institution thatdepends on it. Which epistemology andeducative methods do you avail yourself toachieve progress towards a Marxisthumanism?

PM: That is an important question. I do agree thatneoliberal ism is animated by an identifiable logic orsystem of intel l igibi l i ty. Neoliberal ism’s epistemologicalimperatives are burningly relevant for every criticaleducator; they must be engaged, critiqued andcontested, but the issue for me goes beyondepistemology. Ideas and paradigms and worldviews areimportant, and so are new ways of thinking about

ourselves and our relation to the ecology ofcapital ism, but it is those ideas that are located inthe routines and rituals of everyday life that aremore likely to have an impact on transformingsociety. Critical consciousness is more of anoutcome of certain social practices, culturalformations, habits of mind and the institutionalarrangements that help shape them, as well as therituals and routines that give them legitimacy, than aprecondition for them--but there is no question thatthey are dialectical ly related. But let me discussepistemology first, and then try to make a case forwhy a transformation of our thinking, or our logic, isonly one part--albeit an important part -- of thedialectical struggle for a democratic social ism. Andwhy such a struggle is enriched by a Marxisthumanist analysis as we seek to overcome thecurrent empire of finance capital ism. I ’m interestedin the evolution of neoliberal ism’s cultural logic—or

what you refer to as ‘ supranational superstructural ’logic—and also how it has manifested itself throughoutregional or national contexts. I ’ve been interested in thistopic since the early 1 960s. Those were wide-awakedays of wide-wale corduroy pants, Maynard G. Krebsbeards (as opposed to today’s popular shadow beards),fake turtleneck sweaters (known as “dickies”), faketurquoise Navajo necklackes, milk-crate-l iving room-décor, and neighborhoods where you could count onyour mom-and-pop stores being in the same location forat least the next five years; that was before the dayswhen your favorite empty back lot would suddenly givebirth to a Walmart, a Costco, a Home Depot or your localravine transformed in a month into a suburban businesspark or cookie cutter strip mall . Then came the nerd-cooldays and the high tech revolution, a status-obsessedculture of consumption, more sophisticated anddevastating U.S. imperial ist wars, purbl ind postmoderndoxa, and, of course, the trend towards cultural studies inthe academy. And along came advances in informationtechnology and the social media that were able to pry

Picture by Laura Herrera




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open some cracks in the corporate pavement and thepetrified slough of everyday life, where internet culturewas able to ferti l ize some of Tupac Shakur’s famousroses springing from the cracks in the pavment in theform of “talk-back” forums and on-l ine petitions.

Yet, even with new forms of resistance ushered inby technological innovation, the stiff-gestured ideologyof neoliberal ism has arched towards a state of “humanexceptionalism” where all of humanity is now supposedto feel free to exploit at wil l the relations between natureand society any way that it chooses, as long as profitscan be squeezed out. You really can’t describe thesituation we are in today as an estrangement betweenthe bankers and corporate CEOs and the rest of the 99percent that brings out the worst in both—barefacedgreed and a hateful rel ish in the suffering of others in thefirst and a dystopic and quiescent resignation to theinevitabil ity of capital ism in the second. Because there isno possible future for capital ism that doesn't reproducethe immense suffering of the popular majorities--the 99percent-- in the present because capital ism is premisedon the free development of the few at the cost of theexploitation and immiseration of the many.

The epistemological presuppositions thatundergird neoliberal capital ism can be unraveled l ike anunspooled fi lm; each application of neoliberalprescriptions to knowledge formation can be scrutinizedin the context of the larger mise-en-scène. Culturaltheorists have done an excellent job of understandingthe impact of neoliberal ideology on the production ofspace, place, scale, historical time, and race, gender andclass identity and human agency. I agree that this isimportant work and we need to look at such production inrelation to the commodification of everyday life. Amongother things, neoliberal logic is a logic of the lowestcommon denominator, a technocratic rational ity in whichvalue is accorded to how much surplus value can beextracted and accumulated. Finance or asset

capital ism, accumulation by dispossession, disastercapital ism, crony capital ism--al l of these incarnations ofcapital ist exploitation are an outgrowth of neoliberalideology. I would not be able to think outside ofneoliberal ism's own limits without the ferti l izing influenceof Marx. Uti l izing a historical material ist critique hashelped me to think more deeply about how we might l ivedifferently in the present and imagine futures of concretepossibi l ity outside of neoliberal ism and the logic of valueproduction and where we can break free from theproduction of time, space and self which exists under theservitude of capital.

Historical material ists general ly believe that it ispossible to grasp the object of knowledge, that a worldexists independent of our existence, and that this worldcan be directly grasped (although not ful ly grasped) initself. They wager that the objective world needs to beunderstood in relation to others, to the social character ofboth our being human and our becoming more ful lyhuman. I cal l this a transformative volition, orprotagonistic intent, a praxis of the possible that movesin and on and through the world designed to transformthe material and social conditions that shape us (and areshaped by us) so that our capacities are enhanced andour humanity enlarged. Here, the world can be conceivedas a concrete total ity , a reality that is already astructured, self-forming dialectical whole in the processof coming into existence. Here the challenge is to avoidsolipsism and idealism through a method of analysis anda conception of the world that involves a dialecticalanalysis of reality and a dialectical unity with theoppressed. Here I try to be consistent with the holistichuman science developed by Marx, who, by the way,was no economic determinist. Historical laws of tendencyof capital are not the same for Marx as natural laws.Marx did not ascribe to the idea that capital ism fol lowsuniversal evolutionary laws. History does not fol low asingle trajectory, there are many contingencies andregularities, broadly predictable tendencies and possible

futures. Marx believed in the primacy of materialrelationships as against the primacy of "spirit" and madeus aware that profit does not come from market relations(buying low and sell ing high) but from human laborpower and the sweated labor of the toi l ing class. Now Iam not saying that I bel ieve spiritual values areunimportant. What I am saying is that we need certainmaterial conditions to obtain in society before the questfor spiritual values can be pursued effectively. I f we wanta simple formula to examine humanity, we could say thatthose who have to sell their labor power to earn a living(those who produce the profit for the capital ist) are partof one class--the working class. Those who purchasehuman labor and take the profit away from labor are partof another class—the capital ist class. I fol low Marx’sfocus on the development of human productive forces—avery complex process that is historical ly related to thematerial conditions of production and the class struggle.Every given stage of development of the productiveforces of society—that is, of the human species, and ofthe division of labor—is bound up historical ly with certainsocial relations of production, particularly class relations.Once a particular form of class domination comes intoexistence as a result of this complex process of historicaldevelopment, the dominant element in the relationsattempts to freeze it into place, and the existing societyloses its progressive character. Despite changes in thematerial conditions of production, any rul ing class wil lseek to preserve its rule at al l cost, thus becoming afetter on further social and economic development. Thestate, law, rel igion, and the entire realm of ideas, to theextent that they represent the overarching interests insociety and are conditioned by the underlying set ofsocioeconomic relations, wil l al l be enlisted for thepurpose of defending the status quo and of patching upsociety’s contradictions, often through the disheveledfantasies of Hollywood or the brittle enchantments ofpopular culture. Now what does this al l mean foreducation? Well , it means trying to push capital ists toaddress the suffering of the poor and the oppressed, as




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long as capital ism continues to operate, but we mustrecognize that we need to move beyond capital ism if weever hope to bring about genuine equality and a greaterunfolding of human powers and capacities.

While well-meaning progressive educators mightbe wil l ing to criticize the manner in which humans areturned into dead objects that Marxists refer to asfetishized commodities, they are often loathe to considerthe fact that within capital ist society, al l value originatesin the sphere of production and that one of the primaryroles of schools is to serve as agents or functionaries ofcapital. Furthermore, they fail to understand thateducation is more reproductive of an exploitative socialorder than a constitutive challenge to it preciselybecause it rests on the foundations of capital istexchange value. Reading Marx and Freire may notalchemize us into revolutionaries capable oftranscending capital ism but ignoring what they had tosay about transforming education in the context of classstruggle would be a huge loss to our efforts.

Much of my work has tried to demonstrate thatmany liberal progressive educational reforms areembedded in a larger retrograde, opportunistic andbanalizing politics that situates itself a culture of l iberalcompassion and a polyglot cosmopolitanism that doesmore to impede educational transformation than advanceit.

JMBT: We agree that Education acts as asocial reproducter of the Neoliberal system.And so, it is imbued with its Neoliberal logicand perpetuates the extreme wealth of anegligible minority against the vast majorityof people that struggles to reach arespectable life. What can Educators do tochange this situation and move forward aGlobal Humanist development? How did youstart out in your life to become a critical

educator?

PM: Okay, let me begin, then, with your question aboutmy own history, just briefly. Like many young peoplegrowing up in Canada during the 50s and 60s, I feltincreasingly l ike I was being swallowed up in some viscidmass of dul l , mind-numbing convention, particularly myexperience of being schooled, since I l ike to make adistinction between being schooled and experiencing aneducation. Education requires the cultivation of critique,or critical consciousness, and in my teenage high schoolyears, being intel l igent or able to conscript concepts intothe service of sustained analysis was not something thatearned one a lot of attention with one’s peers, and I wascultural ly shallow enough to want to be part of thepopular crowd, so I would often hide my intel lectualcuriosity about l ife, mostly during moments of grindingloneliness. In those moments I would expostulate withmyself about why my life at school seemed so ruinouslyvacuous, why I was so interminably miserable, why actsof creativity, and why displays of ingenuity and witseemed to be off-l imits and treated by so many teachersas unjudicious, as a type of impolitic epistemologicalbreach. I did have two wonderful and exceptionalteachers my last year of high school—Dennis Hutcheonand Harold Burke. Mr. Burke would do dramatic readingsin class. With lungs as unfi l lable as St. Peter’s Basil ica,he would bellow samplings from Shakespeare andcontemporary plays, which he scrupled to be anindispensable part of a good education, and of course hewas right. In his classes we made earnest, if not halting,attempts to fathom the doxa and paradox, the stereotypeand the novation of everyday life. From Mr. Burke I wouldlearn to appreciate the power of rhetoric, and oftenengaged in debates with a shameless extravagance.Such profl igacy could be tolerated in a young sprat inthose days, and the gasconade that flushed out of mymouth no doubt made me insufferable among many ofmy more learned peers. “Hutch” developed a course on

Communication and the Media that examined thetheories and ideas of Marshall McLuhan. He was also aCatholic convert and largely as a result of his influence Ibecame interested in theology (although Hutch became aconservative Catholic in his later years while I venturedinto the chil ly hinterlands of the Jesuit mind to exploreabstruse books deemed by the guardians of the faith asheretical, works by liberation theologians and apostates).Wanting to join the priesthood, but not having muchrel igious faith, I abandoned the idea, destining myself tol ive on the secular fringes of what was considered at thetime the normal world (where the men no longer wererequired to wear fedoras, but where steri le office cubiclesin some cold stone building became the bleak destiny ofso many of my contemporaries). Often I found myselflost in a world of reading-- Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre,Hesse, Genet, Proust, Northrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan,Harold Innis, Gregory Baum—where I tried in vain todislodge myself from everyday life in the Toronto suburbof Wil lowdale, what was to me a Cimmerian land ofgloom and despair. The work of Dylan Thomas, VachelLindsay, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, and then, ofcourse, the Beat Poets, helped de-anchor me temporari lyfrom my malaise but the intemperate despair of youthwould inevitably overwhelm me.

I grew up in a conservative working-class familywho had left its roots in farming communities of Ontarioto travel to Hamilton, Toronto and other largemetropolitan areas (where my dad landed a job asmanager of Eastern Canada for Phil ips Electronics andbrought us temporari ly into the middle class). I was toldthat my ancestors worked the shipyards in the docks ofGlasgow as riveters and welders, but I haven’t real lygone deeply into my family tree, al l that I remember arepictures of my great uncle on the farm, photos of mymaternal grandfather in a kilt and carrying a riding crop,and photos of my paternal grandfather sel l ing soap out ofthe back of a car. My paternal grandmother l ived with usunti l she died when I was about sixteen and I remember




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she could kick over her head well into her eighties. Anonly child, who watched my father, a WWII veteran in theRoyal Canadian Engineers, enter the reserve army oflabor after he was fired from Phil ips and my mother-ahomemaker-venture out to work to support the family asa telephone operator when my father’s emphysemamade it impossible for him to continue working in part-time electronics stores, I grew up angry, suspicious ofgiving my life over to a corporation, or what we called"the suits." Prior to my dad’s i l lness, our house was afusty solarium of normalcy: television detective storiesand westerns in the evening, televised hockey games,televised comedy shows; in short: televised happinessfor a l ife unexplored (although I did long to travel,Kerouac-style, with Buzz Murdoch and Tod Sti les in theexcellent Route 66 series, and later, down the long andlonesome highway with Jim Bronson [Michael Parks] inthe hit television series, Then Came Bronson). In thelate 60s, I had joined the Yorkvil le Vil lage hippiecommunity as a part-timer, as what was called a“weekender” and Yorkvil le as I remember it was as mucha state of mind as it was a cluster of streets downtownwhere we used to hang out, try every drug imaginable,and sometimes, if we were lucky, get “turned on” to goodbooks and albums and meet Pre-Raphaelite-lookingyoung women who knew members of the Toronto artistand l iterati circles and would invite us along to partiesand gatherings where we would pretend to fit it. Yorkvil lewas a place where, potential ly, you could develop a morediscerning eye for understanding the production ofculture and sometimes come to recognize thecoincidence between mass cultural production and theregression of one's own intel lect, as bikers, greasers,hippies, teenyboppers, and sometimes politicalorganizers, congregated in the coffee shops and flophouses, or just hung out on the streets, al l pretendingthat we were creating a new society free from thenormative shackles of conventional morality and l ifestylebut basical ly we were looking for drugs, sex and rockand rol l and our twenty minutes of fame. That I was

living in the latest phases of capital ist globalization wasnot something that arrested my attention, evenmomentari ly. I t had not occurred to me that such aexploration of the "integral society" was important—oreven significant—or that it was necessary to fathom themeans and ways that I was situated in the larger socialorder, immersed in an internal ly differentiated yetdialectical ly unified nation state called Canada, l iving inthe fringes of a civi l society consisting of an ensemble ofpractices and relations of power dialectical lyinterpellated by and integrated within the state. That waslife before critical theory, sociology, anthropology,hermeneutics and existential phenomenology. Life waslived as a crude binarism: We were cool and everybodyelse was suspiciously uncool, especial ly anyone overthirty. There was even an adversarial relationship at thattime between youth-based politics and social movementsadvocating class struggle. Yorkvil le was more aboutl ifestyle and counterculture as opposed to the politicaltransformation of society, and the Maoists that you mightinfrequently encounter appeared to us as too mil itant ordogmatic to be taken seriously if one wanted to enjoy thebohemian l ifestyle and that's what we were looking for inthose days. I became politicized later on, mainly byAmericans who had left the US as a result of the Vietnamwar and ended up my professors at Waterloo Universityand the University of Toronto, although admittedly thiswas a New Left politicization, with identity politics, civi lrights and new social movements (feminism, gay rights,immigrant rights) displacing rather than integrating intomuch of the previous class-based political formations.

I recall that there was a City Control ler, HerbOrl iffe, who suggested, ominously, in the Spring of 1 967that Yorkvil le’s hippies should be warehoused in workcamps where they would learn a trade. I recognized thata desinence had arrived in the trajectory that my life wastaking, and that the Yorkvil le scene was dying, and by1 968, I had come to the inevitable realization that achange in my life was sorely needed. Well , I ’ve written

about what happened next—the beating I took withflashl ights administered by the Metropolitan police in adank North York jai l , meeting Alan Ginsberg, my trip tothe US, my psychedelic evening with Timothy Leary, theexhilarating craziness of San Francisco and Los Angelesin the summer of 1 968, so I won’t recount those dayshere. How was any of this distinctly Canadian, I ’m notsure because I didn’t real ly reflect upon my Canadianroots unti l I ended up in the United States, what beganas a desperate sojourn but what has lasted 28 years andcounting, having lost my university teaching post inCanada due to my increasingly politicized teaching, andbeing rescued by Henry Giroux, who brought me toMiami University of Ohio and helped me figure out howto do political work and remain in the academy. Living inOhio, I was often told by students that I reminded them ofa Northern American, a decaffeinated American, ratherthan a Canadian, an observation, frankly, I founddisturbing, and very tel l ing about the US students andculture. While geo-specifical ly Canadian, and workingwithin a colonial ity of power that I often felt obl iged tocritique, I think my identity growing up in Canada wasmore mobile than nationalist, if not badly mangled,bleeding through the figurative membranes of itsCanadian-ness, as something that was always alreadyforeign to itself, as I real ly didn’t have a sense of what itmeant to be a Canadian but at the same time I tried toaccount for the people I met and the ideas I encounteredin the context of l iving a l ife in the service of somethinglarger than one’s nation state, trying to understand whatit meant to be of service to society. I felt I belongedeverywhere, and nowhere, everywhere an aberration,and nowhere did I feel remotely comfortable--I suppose Igrew comfortable in my discomfort. Moving away to theUS, however, motivated me to claim a Canadian identity(as opposed to re-claiming an already well suturedCanadian identity) inasmuch as I grew to loathe the USpolitical scene, its American exceptionalism, itsimperial ist wars, its phony democracy, it’s incipient andthen blatant fascism—and I wanted to claim something




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outside of that, which at times I would label Canadian.Especial ly during my visits to Latin America, I highl ightedmy Canadian identity but, to be fair, I have beenimpacted in many ways by American activists andthinkers and I feel I am all the better for that. I am moreinterested now in a politics of sol idarity and“communalidad” than I am in conventional identitypolitics. What drives me today is not narrating the manytrajectories of selfhood as much as committing myself toa protagonistic politics, forging a united front againstcapital and its attendant hydra-headed antagonisms:racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, abelism,speciesism, and the l ike. What I can tel l you now is that Ido feel much more comfortable among workers and thepopular majorities than I do among the transnationalcapital ist class, the bourgeoisie, and that is the case inal l the countries in which I am regularly privi leged tospend time. Well , on to the next parts of your question.

I f there exists a structured silence and motivatedamnesia surrounding the urgent task of historicizingpower relations in concrete material conditions ofproduction and reproduction, and if, fol lowing this, thereexists a grand refusal to disclaim the limitations ofbourgeois ethics in the project of social transformationand, final ly, if there remains a studied reluctance toengage the concrete multi layered total ity of everyday lifein which use value is subordinated to exchange value,then we can’t simply blame the education system orteachers for churning out capital ist dupes. We are alldupes to some extent and each day I am striving tobecome less so, as I continue to take advantage of mypotential to be a learner. As I tried to point out in mydiscussion of my experiences as a youth growing up inCanada, teachers are not immune to the rul ing ideas oftheir society, which, as Marx noted, are usually the ideasof the rul ing class. And, so, as we know, the educatorsthemselves must be educated. As Marx opined in hisTheses on Feuerbach, “The material ist doctrine that menare products of circumstances and upbringing, and that,

therefore, changed men are products of changedcircumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it ismen who change circumstances and that the educatormust himself be educated.” Even the teachers unionshave been in the grip of neoliberal education policies,although for years I have advocated a social movementunionism—that is dedicated to engage beyond workplaceconcerns, but also in terms of wider political struggle forsocial and economic justice, for human rights, and forparticipatory and direct democracy. Social movementunionism works with affi l iates in worker’s movements,women’s movements, student movements, other humanrights organizations to and integrates them into a broadernetwork or popular front against injustice and exploitationby the rul ing class.

Revolutionary critical pedagogy is part of anecosystem of political activism that includes communityorganizations, teachers organizations, and larger humanrights groups advocating for multicultural education, gay,lesbian, transgender and bisexual rights, l iving wages,ecological justice, and disabil ity rights, and anti-racistand anti-imperial ist organizations. Here we findcurriculum organizations, teacher educationorganizations, and educational pol icy organizationsworking together against standardized testing, theprivatization of public schooling, the school to prisonpipel ine, advocating for parent and communityinvolvement in schools.

The overal l agenda that I have been trying todevelop since the mid-1 990s is captured in thedescription of what István Mészáros calls social isteducation: “the social organ through which the mutuallybeneficial reciprocity between the individuals and theirsociety becomes real. ” My concern has been withmarshaling critical pedagogy as a broad, non-sectariancoalition or social movement into the service of alteringhistorical modes of production and reproduction inspecific social formations, including if not especial ly

educational formations.

The question we need to ask is: How do youabolish value production, wage labor? We need to gobeyond state intervention into the economy, since this isnot social ism. State intervention into the economydoesn’t prevent value-producing labor, al ienated labor.In fact, capital is a social relation of abstract labor, and itis precisely capital as a social relation that must betranscended. Of course, this is the challenge for al l ofus. To go up against the ideological state apparatuses(that also have coercive practices such as non-promotionand systems of privi lege for those who fol low the rules)and the repressive state apparatuses (that are alsocoercive in that they secure internal unity and socialauthority ideological ly via patriotism and nationalism) isnot an easy task. There are disjunctions anddisarticulations within and between different socialspaces of the superstructure and we must work withinthose, in spaces of the legal and ideological systems thatcan be transformed in the interests of social andeconomic justice. The struggle is multi-pronged.

Revolutionary critical pedagogy is a mode ofsocial knowing that inquires into what is not said, into thesilences and the suppressed or the missing, in order toun-conceal operations of economic and political powerunderlying the concrete detai ls and representations ofour l ives. I t reveals how the abstract logic of theexploitation of the division of labor informs all thepractices of culture and society. Material ist critiquedisrupts that which represents itself as natural and thusas inevitable and explains how it is material ly produced.Critique, in other words, enables us to explain how socialdifferences—gender, race, sexuality, and class—havebeen systematical ly produced and continue to operatewithin regimes of exploitation—namely within theinternational division of labor in global capital ism, so thatwe can fight to change them. Thus, a pedagogy ofcritique is about the production of transformative




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knowledges. I t is not about l iberty as the freedom ofdesire, because this l iberty, this freedom of desire, isacquired at the expense of the poverty of others. Apedagogy of critique does not situate itself in the spaceof the self, or in the space of desire, or in the space ofl iberation, but in the site of col lectivity, need andemancipation.

To sum up, teachers need to support sustainablealternatives to neoliberal capital ism with its emphasis oneconomic growth; protect nature’s resources for futuregenerations; protect ecosystems and help supportbiodiversity; support a community based economics, anda grassroots democracy that includes participatory anddirect forms, embody anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-sexist,and anti-homophobic pedagogies that respect diversityand work from a post-patriarchal perspective. I won’tsummarize here the imperatives and practices of criticalpedagogy, or popular education, except to say that theseapproaches build from the experiences of students, andemploy languages that help students interrogate thetransparency of their own experiences, that is, languagesthat enable students to challenge the interpretation oftheir experiences and that assist students in connectingtheir own experiences and histories to broader situationsthat are local, regional, national and global in scope. Ithink it’s important to give students the opportunity tothink dialectical ly and employ an historical material istperspective in analyzing their own communities andrelationships in their neighborhoods and schools. Notonly do teachers need to become critical researchers butthey should give students the opportunity to acquireresearch skil ls. There are lots of theoretical perspectivesthat teachers can draw from—critical disabil ity studies,critical ethnography, feminist theory, critical race theory,postcolonial theory and the work of the new “decolonialschool” who work from the premise that we need to fightthe “colonial ity of power.” Also, l iberation theology offersa tremendously rich source of understanding state poweras a form of ‘social sin. ’ What this comes down to is

encouraging teachers to become transdiscipl inary publicintel lectuals who are engaged in what Henry Giroux hascalled “public pedagogy.” Teachers can learn a lot fromthe Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela in becoming“public pedagogues,” and the work being done in themisiones Bolivarianas. Here students connect theirlearning to working on community projects. All learningis connected to improving the l ives of famil ies and socialgroups. All of this activity requires adopting a philosophyof praxis. I t is a disposition that one acquires. I t does notcome from becoming critical ly conscious and thenentering into revolutionary activity, in fact criticalconsciousness is more of an outcome of revolutionaryactivity than a precondition for it. The revolution makescritical educators as much as critical educators make arevolution. As Che taught us, revolutions producesubjectivity and agency (aesthetical ly, ethical ly andideological ly) simultaneously with new social relations ofproduction. I cal l this “protagonistic agency.” An agencyfor building a radical ly new future.

JMBT: We know the importance of theproduction of knowledge because it imposesthe established "truth" inside schools. Themost inhumane consequences of thecapitalist system are behind this ¨truth" thatperpetuates human inequality. What role domedia and textbook publishers play in thisissue? What can be done to establishmechanisms that ensure that the knowledgetaught in schools is reliable?

PM: Since capital ist democracy is real ly an oxymoron,capital ism's relationship to democracy has always beena "sweetheart deal", with one partner playing off theother. One plays the comic, while the other plays the'straight' man who sets the comic up for the joke. Oneplays the good cop, and the other plays the 'bad cop' andthen they switch roles. Capital ism produces economicinequality and extreme poverty while democracy covers it

up in the name of the never-ending search for ‘diversity, ’or ‘human rights’ or ‘freedom of choice, ’ or whatever isthe flavor of the month, thereby undermining the wholenotion that we can have any real pol itical equality in acapital ist society. The popular majorities—those who areforced to survive on wage labor, sometimes known asthe 99 percent—are never able to win great substantialvictories for democracy, but are forced to acceptincremental steps towards achieving some smallvictories in the areas of progressive taxation, health care,universal education, retirement pensions, andenvironmental and consumer protections and civi l rights.Even though these small victories are reversingthemselves, drastical ly in some case, the transnational

capital ist class makessure the situationdoesn’t get so bad thatthe 99 percent takesto the streets l ike theydid during the OccupyWall street movementheyday, so they wil lsel l hope for the futurefor those that agree tobe patient. But suchhope is real ly snake oilin disguise. The richdon’t needgovernment socialassistance, they canbuy all that they need

of anything, privately. With so much structuraldependence on corporate dollars, real democracy is outof reach in the United States. What about the world-producing power of the media? In these days of financecapital and banking deregulation, the media are going toremain in the hands of private corporations that workhand-in-hand with the government.

Powerful commercial media owners who are




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sanctioned by the government control the production ofknowledge, and set the l imits on what gets said and whatdoesn’t get said, and create the contexts in whichinformation is valued or perceived as unimportant. Themil itary/industrial/digital sectors of the media are all partof the ‘power complex’ we associate with financecapital ism. Robert McChesney has written about how themedia operate as an oligopoly through corporatelobbyists, pol itical campaign contributions, governmentmedia policies, the control of news coverage bycorporate elites, and the enforcement of monopolisticrights for those broadcasters who can make the mostprofit. Media reform almost impossible in this context.

The potential of the internet for the deepening andenhancement of democracy has been destroyed by thesuccess of monopoly capital ism and the internet hasactual ly contributed as much to inequality as it has tofostering equality and here I am particularly concernedabout the potential of the media to aid in the surveil lanceof citizens and well as the propagandizing againstsocial ist alternatives to capital ism. Google, for instance,spent 5 mil l ion dollars lobbying in Washington in the firstthree months of 201 2. Political participation as a meansof creating a more democratic future is l imited by theinternet’s commercial ization. We are seeing antitrustlaws being overlooked, we are seeing an increase indigital technology patents, and the monopoly ofcorporations such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft.You can’t have a real democratic public sphere thatadvances the interests of community and publicparticipation as long as it is monopolized by corporategreed, fueled by indirect government subsidies andmade to bow to commercial interests through anincrease in copyrights, patents, and proprietary systems.I t is interesting to me how the corporate media in theUnited States helps to disguise itself as being "free" byattacking Hugo Chavez’s treatment of the media inVenezuela. Most media outlets here in the United Statescriticized Chavez for restricting and manipulating the

media in Venezuela. But the Venezuelan governmentdoes not control its media. Many people in the U.S.bel ieve that al l the television channels and newspapersare pro-Chávez. The truth is that most of Venezuela’smedia is anti-Chávez. Yes, Chávez took action againstanti-Chávez network RCTV (Radio Caracas TelevisiónInternacional) but the U.S. media does not provide thehistorical context.

As reported in only a few alternative mediaoutlets, Venezuelan television has four major networks:Venevisión, Televen, Globovisión, and Venezolana deTelevisión (VTV). Of these four networks, Venevisión andTeleven are moderately anti-Chávez, Globovisión is veryanti-Chávez, and VTV is extremely pro-Chávez. There isthe notorious RCTV (Radio Caracas TelevisiónInternacional) which faked fi lm footage to make it lookl ike pro-Chavez gunmen were shooting downdemonstrators on the streets of Caracas when in fact itwas anti-Chavez gunmen. This is one of several reasonsthat the government of Venezuela declined to renewRCTV's broadcast l icense. About 60% of the televisionaudience in Venezuela watches Venevisión and Televen.Only about 6% of Venezuelans watch VTV. MostVenezuelan media is owned by right-wing business eliteswho are strongly mobil ized against the social ist pol iticsand policies of Hugo Chávez that support Venezuela’spoor and powerless. The majority of the Venezuelanmedia notoriously conspired with the coup leaders intheir fai led 2002 attempt to oust Chavez from power. Themedia refused to show statements by the Chavezgovernment condemning the coup d’état. When the coupd’état fai led, the private Venezuelan networks refused tobroadcast the news that Chávez had been restored backto power as a result of hundreds of thousands of pro-Chavez supporters surrounding Miraflores Palacedemanding him back and as a result of sectors of themil itary turning to support Chavez. You can see thefootage of this in the fly-on-the-wall documentarydirected by Irish fi lmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha

Ó Briain, This Revolution Wil l Not Be Televised. Or watchOliver Stone's documentary, South of the Border. Again,President Hugo Chavez did not "shut down" RCTV onMay 27th. The Venezuelan government decided not torenew the broadcast l icense that granted RCTV amonopoly over a section of the publicly-ownedfrequencies. I t is the case that RCTV sti l l reaches halfthe population through its cable and satel l ite operations.That's not bad for a television station that committedtreason against a democratical ly-elected President,whose many election victories were consideredextremely fair by President Jimmy Carter.

Sure, it is true that government television isoverwhelmingly favorable towards Chávez but only sixpercent of Venezuelans watch government-owned VTV.And yes, Chávez did interrupt news programming withhours of cadenas (political viewpoints) but this hardlycounteracts or balances out the 23 other hours of anti-Chávez broadcasting. Okay, what about thenewspapers? Venezuela has three major newspapers:Últimas Noticias, El Nacional, and El Universal. ÚltimasNoticias is pro-Chávez; El Nacional and El Universal areanti-Chávez. El Nacional, as is commonly known, isowned by Miguel Henrique Otero, a founder of the anti-Chávez organization Movimiento 2D. There are alsomore anti-Chavez radio stations in Venezuela than pro-Chavez stations, since only 1 4 percent of radio is publiclyowned.

That this ardent visionary who fought austeritymeasures , who agitated for the poor and the powerless,who founded the movement for the fifth republic, whointegrated the downtrodden and marginal ized into themainstream of Venezuelan society, and who helpedmake his country one of the most equal in Latin America,would be so demonized in the capital ist press is not sosurprising. This son of rural schoolteachers created acrack in the concrete wall of finance capital ism wheresome roses were able to push through. The wall is




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growing, unfortunately, and getting thicker. I look atmedia, surveil lance technology, and mil itary technologynow, such as drones, and really do believe we are livingin the midst of some kind of Orwell ian dystopia. Amidstthis chil iasm of doom, there are courageous peoplespeaking out—the journalist Chris Hedges is one, NoamChomsky is another, and there are others. And they arecertainly true heroes. But what can we say, as educators,about l iving in the United States today when Congressunanimously passes The National Defense AuthorizationAct (NDAA), where Section 1 021 (b)(2) of NDAA givesthe mil itary having the power to detain you on Americansoil , without due process, indefinitely, at the discretion ofthe President? On December 4, 201 2, the new NDAApassed the Senate with a 98-0 vote. That is the date thatfascism was formally instal led in the United States.When I was a young man, I read Orwell ’s novel, 1 984. Infact, I have the first Signet Books edition, published in1 950 by the New American Library. The cheap, pulp-fiction book cover shows a sexy woman in a low-cutdress, standing back-to-back with a man wearing asleeveless work shirt. To the left there is a man in a blackcap and black jumpsuit and he looks l ike he is holdingthe handle of a whip. The advertisement at the top of thefront cover reads, “A Startl ing View of Life in 1 984.Forbidden lovep.Fearp.Betrayal. ” And on the back,there appears a question: Which One Wil l YOU Be In theYear 1 984? There are four choices: Proletariat, PoliceGuard, Party Member, Male and Party Member, Female.I ’ l l just read you the description of the Party Members.Party Member, Male: “Face-less, mind-less, a flesh-and-blood robot with a push-button brain, you’re denied loveby law, taught hate by the fl ick of a switch! PartyMember, Female: “A member of the Anti-Sex Leaguefrom birth, your duty wil l be to smother al l humanemotion, and your children might not be your husband’s!”Now the book was obviously marketed to depict theimpending communist threat of the Soviet Union. Butlook around today and consider who is executingenemies by flying drones, who is practicing

‘extraordinary rendition” and arresting people without dueprocess and moving them into secret detention centers,who has created a national security state with camerasat every corner? In the year 2006, during the Bushadministration, the FBI were investigating the l ibrary atUCLA to see what books students were checking out, thesame year I was placed at the top of the “Dirty Thirty“ l istof leftist professors by a right-wing group who offered topay students one hundred dollars to secretly audiotapemy seminars, and 50 dollars to provide notes from myclasses. When I scan the cover of 1 984, it does notsurprise me that it was meant to titi l late the reader.Today it is clear that it is so-cal led capital ist democracythat has ominously spawned a complacent populace(outspoken, yes, but never the less complacent),complacent enough to purge the collective psyche andkeep it at bay long enough to enable us to commit themost heinous of crimes. Just l ike in 1 984, we ‘invent’enemies and then build a war economy trying to fightthem. Take the war on Iraq. The company, Hall iburton,which was run by former Vice-President Dick Cheney,was given $39.5 bil l ion in Iraq-related contracts over thepast decade, with many of the deals given without anybidding from competing firms. While the financial cost ofthe war was in excess of $1 .7 tri l l ion dollars, the cost inhuman misery knows no price. Today it seems thathuman relationships are more than ever self-interested;loyalty among friends is disappearing; people who claima friendship with you wil l betray you in acts of self-righteous indignation if it gives them an advantage; lovehas been reduced to chemicals swarming through thebody while the heart has been replaced by a hornet’snest. I bel ieve that imperial capital ism has served as theincubus in creating a collective U.S. Psyche, whosestructural unconscious is indistinguishable from thecharacter in American Psycho. By the time that thePsycho finds out who he is, wil l i t be too late?

JMBT: We believe that it is necessary to showin every educational curricula issues such aswater poisoning by extraction of heavy crudeoil, child exploitation or deforestation forcommercial reasons. We believe that to teachabout the reasons and the consequences ofthose sad situations should be the first stepto raise awareness and walk towards socialjustice. Do you think it is possible tointroduce this type of knowledge ineducation?

PM: This is an excellent group of questions, Jose. Whatcan we do as educational and cultural workers, at thiscrucial moment in history, when corporate revenueexpands as the job market shrinks, when there is such acallous disregard for human suffering and human life,when the indomitable human spirit gasps for air in anatmosphere of intel lectual paralysis, social amnesia, andpolitical quiescence, when the translucent hues of hopeseem ever more ethereal, when thinking about the futureseems anachronistic, when the concept of utopia hasbecome irretrievably Disneyfied, when our social roles ascitizens have become increasingly corporatized andinstrumental ized in a world which hides necessity in thename of consumer desire, when media analyses ofmil itary invasions is just another infomercial for the USmil itary industrial complex with its huge global armsindustry, and when teachers and students al ike wallow inabsurdity, waiting for the junkyard of consumer l ife tovomit up yet another panacea for despair? Just whatcan we do as inmates in the prison-house of capital ism,ensepulchured in the cold vault of commodity culture?

You mentioned in your question about theexploitation of children. What about the murder ofchildren? What about the justification of torture? AsAmericans flock to the movie, Zero Dark Thirty, by thebri l l iant and gifted director, Kathryn Bigelow (whomNaomi Wolf appositely named the new Leni Riefenstahl,




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“torture’s handmaiden” and “apologist for evil”) to rejoicein the apparent success of the U.S. government’s planfor sodomizing and water boarding suspected Muslimterrorists, no U.S. citizen, whether l iving within or outsidethe U.S. , is safe from drone surveil lance orassassination. President Obama can protest al l he wantsabout the availabi l ity of guns in the United States (300mil l ion guns are registered to private owners), but hedoes not seem to care a whiff about al l the children dyingin his drone strikes around the world. According to theBureau of Investigative Journalism, there have beenapproximately 399-500 drone strikes to-date, andapproximately 3,000 individuals have been kil led bythese strikes, many of them innocent civi l ians, includingwomen and children. In Pakistan alone, 891 civi l ianshave been kil led by U.S. drones since 2004. Theseairborne assassination operations are taking place at thebehest of those leaders who seek no alternative toprofit-driven imperial rule and are occurring withincreasing regularity throughout the Middle East, SouthAsia and Africa.

Innocent men, women and children in countriesthat the U.S. is not even at war with are being kil led byU.S. hel lfire missi les, attacks which go unchallenged byCongress or the Judiciary, and most of which areapproved by President Obama. Of the over 3000 peoplekil led so far, the vast majority of them are non-combatant"col lateral damage" deaths and of these, 1 72 havereportedly been children. Of course, the so-cal led'permanent' war on terrorism can be waged on sovereigncountries with the use of drones, for surveil lance, orweaponized in the case of the “grunts” of the droneworld, the Predator and the Reaper. Here the mil itary fistgoes airborne to extend its lethal reach, in the form ofcog-eyed ‘droogs’ affixed with the sandals of Hermes,their brass knuckled missi les covered with l ightweightlatex autopsy gloves. But, alas, there wil l be no silver-bodied Marias from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to man theanti-aircraft guns and lead the oppressed to victory over

their oppressors. We live at an ignominious time inhistory, when the president of the United States has thepower to make targeted kil l ings of American citizens. AU.S. airstrike in eastern Afghanistan not long ago kil led1 0 civi l ians, including five children. The deadly attackcame just hours after the State of the Union speech inwhich President Barack Obama falsely claimed that themore than decade-long U.S. war and occupation inAfghanistan “wil l be over” by the end of next year. Okay,on to the next part of your question.

You mentioned “deforestation” and the “poisoningof water.” Yes we should be examining these issues at al llevels of the school system. When we think of questionssuch as "how to provide a stable growth of the globaleconomy so as put the aggrieved communities of theworld back to work," we make the mistaken assumptionthat just getting people to produce and consume morecommodities is the answer to the problems we are facingduring this horrific economic crisis. We think that if webecome more creative and more efficient producers, thenwe could also pay off the debt, create jobs, increaseeconomic equality, find ways to protect the integrity of theplanet’s ecosystems and dramatical ly increasebiodiversity, and the l ike. This is a collective fl ight offancy that only helps reproduce the geopolitical andeconomic logics of the existing corporate oligopoly.Because increasing the size of the economy does notnecessari ly mean there wil l be more jobs. And the largerthe economy, the more danger we pose to the planet’sbiodiversity since we wil l be using a greater number ofresources, and releasing more carbon dioxide into theatmosphere. The problem is that our economy is alreadytoo rel iant on growth as it is—the goal of the economyshould not be continuous growth, it should not be rel ianton aggregate growth as a model for generating jobs. Allthis talk about expanding the economy at al l costs reallyis a smokescreen for raising taxes on workers, cuttingtaxes on corporations, undermining worker safety, andpaying less wages to workers, not to mention weakening

the labor unions.

We need in our schools to excavate therelationship between capital ism and ecologicalsustainabil ity. We should have as an important theme inour classrooms the great financial crisis that erupted inthe fal l of 2008 and the deep global recession thatfol lowed in its wake. But do you think this would go wellwith the oligarchic bourgeoisie, who are currentlyprofiting from the fusion of banking and monopoly capitaland who are consolidating their power through anintersection of economic and political forms ofdomination? As capital moves freely, investing inproduction or in fictitious forms of capital ism, and asspeculators, financier capital ists, stock and bond traders,investment bankers, hedge fund mangers, and othershelp to unleash the forces of capital accumulationglobally, and as neo-l iberal ism with its aggressive pro-market state policies al lows this finance capital torestructure itself, to diversify its forms, to expand itsaccumulation opportunities through the growth of retai l ,financial and service industries, and enhance its globalreach, then it is safe to assume that our ecosystemshave been harnessed exploitatively in a system ofcapital ist commodity production such that we cannot talkabout capital ism at al l without talking about capital ism asa world ecology. The whole physiognomy of capital ismhas changed, with finance capital requiring a paral lelaccumulation of political power, with financiers married toan unchecked political ol igarchy spawning highlyparasitic fanancial ized forms of capital ism such as asset-stripping. The vampire of capital ism has grown a secondset of fangs. The long shadow of Nosferatu fal ls across asystematic and ongoing attack on the l iving standards ofthe vast majority of the population.

We need economic policies that don’t rely onbenchmarks such as increasing the Gross DomesticProduct. We need to improve the well-being of workersand bring to a grinding halt long-term environmental




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damage. We need to shorten the working day, notincrease it, and distribute evenly the available work. Weneed to abandon our debt-based money system becauseif you have a debt-based monetary system you wil l haveto generate constant economic growth in order to payback your debts.

We need to adopt a vision of sustainabil ity andself-rel iance animated by social ist ideas and ideals suchas egalitarianism and social justice. I have labeled suchan effort ‘revolutionary critical ecopedagogy’ which is acombination of an historical ly focused application ofMarx’s theory , revolutionary critical pedagogy andtheoretical advances made in ecopedagogy work, suchas the admirable accomplishments of Richard Kahn,David Greenwood, Tina Evans, Donna Houston, SamFassbinder, Anthony Nocella, Steve Best, and others.

We have entered a post-genomic era in which weyearn to create some kind of bio-scientifical ly engineeredparadise where all sentient l ife can languish in somebovine stupor, in some chemical ly altered pseudo realitystage-managed by transnational psychotropic drugdealers who offer to chemical ly separate us from theemotional squalor of our Precambrian brain through avast array of designer l ifestyle drugs, where we sit inuninterrupted epiphanic bl iss at the feet of a statue of aQuarter Pounder in some prosaic cobblestone courtyardat a secluded Ronald McDonald House next to an 1 8-hole golf course, or in some kind of edenic trans-humanextended epiphany in a university seminar roomoverflowing with just the correct mixture of a Leibnizianoptimism and Nietzschean Dionysian pessimism. Orwhere we can be perpetual ly ‘on the road’ in somebohemian fantasy redolent of the 1 960s San FranciscoRenaissance. But is al l this necessary if we havealready embraced the Hobbesian vision of completesubmission to total authority, if we have become wil l ingsupplicants of a communications post-industrial complexin which our feelings are already given structure by the

primordial rants and faits et gestes of intrepid talk showhosts with their bone-hard patriotism? Where punditsbloviate incessantly about God and country, corporategasbags and blathering propagandists who would bemore appropriately rendered if al l but their voices werereplaced by animated characters. Only a cartooncharacter without a soul could actual ly defend largecorporations and the wealthy who avoid more than $1 00bil l ion in taxes every year by setting up offshore taxshelters in places l ike the Cayman Islands (home tomore than 1 8,000 corporations), Bermuda and theBahamas that help giant multinationals l ike GeneralElectric avoid bil l ions of dol lars in corporate incometaxes. Or defend the Supreme Court in Citizens Unitedv. Federal Election Commission in 201 0, which foundthat the first amendment to the U.S. constitution, onfreedom of speech, prohibits the government fromrestricting independent political expenditures bycorporations and unions, a rul ing which effectively givescorporations the same status and rights as people, thuscoining the term corporate personhood. Or defend thereauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, aspying bil l that violates the Fourth Amendment and givesvast, unchecked surveil lance authority to thegovernment, and extends the powers of the NationalSecurity Agency to conduct surveil lance of Americans’international emails and phone calls. Or support thenews laws that make it an act of terrorism to investigateanimal cruelty, food safety or environmental violations onthe corporate-control led farms that produce much of ourmeat, eggs and dairy products. With many Tea Partysupporters maintaining that legislation aimed at reducinggun violence is a violation of the God-given right of 'man'to have access to assault rifles, that state action againstthe right of self-defense is by default a violation of thenatural rights of man, and that the only way to stopviolence like the recent Newtown school massacre is tohave more male teachers armed in class with guns, wemight want to consider this country as fi l led with rel igiousextremists of the same ilk as those we are currently

labeling 'terrorists. '

Bi l l McKibben makes a crucial point that cl imatechange is an issue that does not have the luxury oflengthy debates such as those that address, say,educational pol icy or immigration, debates that oftenspawn only incremental changes. Climate change isabout physics and if we don’t act now, it wil l be too late.The fossil fuel industry creates carbon dioxide andtransforms it into heat. And it’s the most lucrativebusiness on the planet. I f we want to stop the arctic icefrom melting, we need to cut toxic emissions by about5% globally each year—starting immediately. The fossilfuel industry has already bought off Congress. The WhiteHouse has overruled the EPA on its proposals forstronger smog and ozone regulations and the miningindustry is already buying off vast tracts of Wyoming’sPowder River Basin. I t’s almost too late to say it’s toolate.

Jason W. Moore argues persuasively that wecannot separate political economy, sociology, ecology,biology, and other discipl inary approaches involved inunderstanding humanity from extra-human nature. Thisis because humans and the rest of nature mutuallyconstitute each other. According to Moore, capital ism isa way of harnessing the endless accumulation of capital,it is, in effect, “a world-ecology.”

Neoliberal ism—which rel ies on a coercive state-finance nexus as its lodestone—has reordered the globalrelation between humans and the rest of nature. Humannature is reduced to labor productivity. Unl ike the case informer crises of capital ism, there is no sign today of anew labor productivity revolution anywhere, not here inthe U.S. , in Latin America, or in China. According toMoore, the four cheaps—cheap energy, cheap rawmaterials, cheap labor power and cheap food werenecessary for post-1 983 capital ist profitabil ity. This is nolonger the case, as we are seeing a reversal of cheap




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food, energy and raw materials, and labor power. Moorewarns that we are facing seemingly insurmountableproblems: rising energy costs, escalating competition forarable land for agrofuels, the grow of invasive species,the herbicide/glyphosate-resistant superweeds effect,aquifer depletion, and end of cheap water as globalwarming melts glaciers, and the weakening effectivenessof ferti l izers on yield growth. Neoliberal capital ism hasexhausted all the ‘free’ wealth of nature—uncommodifiedenergy, water, resources and labor—in short, it hasexhausted the very conditions of its reproduction. Theworld-historical col lapse of capital ism’s longue dureeregime of profitabil ity and the epochal rupture ofneoliberal accumulation by dispossession, is signaled byan endemic decline on the profit rates that has hauntedthe specter of capital ism for decades.

Capital ism has voraciously sucked the productivesystem of the world dry—nature’s available bounty—byreplacing l iving labor at the point of production by moreand more innovative forms of labor-saving devices.Capital ism—which we view as a world ecology ratherthan an economic system—is responding to this crisis byredistributing value from labor to capital, with “value”here referring to the elements of production, labor power,means of production, and profit. This extraction of valueundermines opportunities for productive investment andthis can be seen in the degrading practices ofoutsourcing, casualization, dehumanizing workingconditions and union busting. For the past four yearsalmost nothing meaningful has been done to stop therampant production and release into the atmosphere ofever greater amounts of carbon dioxide, and there haveeven been more frantic cal ls for more production of oiland expanded use of coal as a fuel. We have entered anew era of nature-society relations with the advent of thepenetration of finance capital—which is ushering in theend of cheap food, resources, water, and everythingelse. All of global nature has become dependent on acircuit of capital premised on accumulation by financial

means rather than on industrial or agricultural production.These are all messages coming from Jason W. Moore,John Bellamy Foster, Joel Kovel, and other Marxistthinkers who are talking ecology seriously. Now it is upto critical educators to bring this message into theclassrooms. We also need to l isten to authors such asHeather Rogers, who has undertaken a devastatingcritique of “ethical consumerism” and today’s much-touted “green” solutions—carbon offsets, organic food,biofuels, and eco-friendly cars and homes—in her book,Green Gone Wrong . According to Rogers, Wal-Mart andGeneral Electric are just two of many firms that arepushing green capital ism. Rogers reveals how recentefforts to go green by swapping our dirty goods for“clean” ones are mired in contradictions and falseassumptions, as these ‘earth-friendly products’ do l ittle tominimize damage when they fail to break the mold ofconsumption and waste. Rogers expertly admonisheswhat she calls “lazy environmental ism” and also"greenwashing"—corporate public relations campaignsdesigned to soothe and prevent public criticism ofcorporations over pollution, waste, environmentaldecimation and health threats. These approaches sti l lrely on market forces and therefore cannot make the

type of difference necessary to protect the planet. GreenGone Wrong explores how the conversion from a “petro”to a “green” society affects the most fundamentalaspects of l ife: food, shelter, and transportation andincludes unintended consequences such as massiveclear-cutting, destruction of native ecosystems, andgrinding poverty. Rogers exposes eco-friendlyconsumption and market-friendly buzzwords l ike “green,”“organic, ” and “fair trade” and shows us that they are, ineffect, mostly disingenuous scams. We can’t save theearth by purchasing compact fluorescent l ight bulbs,hybrid gas-electric cars and carbon offsets or by buyingthe correct environmental friendly products. Organic foodshoppers may be unwittingly subsidizing big farmcompanies that are eradicating forests and defi l ing thesoil in some developing countries because theirgovernments are often not concerned aboutenvironmental problems. And many well-intentionedNGOs just don’t have much power. The production of"green" goods is actual ly contributing—although notintentional ly—to the escalation of environmental i l ls.What is offered to consumers by the GreenMarketplace—organic and fair-trade foods, eco-architecture, bio-fuels, hybrid automobiles, and carbonoffsets, etc. ,—just wil l not work within the social universeof capital ism and the consumer marketplace and oftenleads to problems that green capital ism was designed toalleviate. Small farmers who use "unconventional" or"beyond organic" agricultural practices are often unableto make a living wage and have to rely on off-farmsources for the majority of their income. Those who arecashing in on the green revolution are corporations suchas Walmart and General Mil ls. Keeping up with thedemand for organic foods has led to deforestation inplaces l ike Paraguay where stretches of rainforest areturned into organic monocrops like sugar cane.Ecoarchitecture can help reduce the 40 percent of al lCO2 gas in the United States that comes from buildingsbut such architecture is l imited to wealthy Americans.Demand for palm oil—which is increasingly used in




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biodiesel—is growing and to meet this demand tropicalrainforests and peatlands in South East Asia are beingtorn up to provide land for oil palm plantations. Crop-based biofuels are also destroying food supplies andpushing up the price of corn and other crops up to 80percent. In India, Rogers discovered that carbon offsetventures were doing more harm than good becausecarbon offset money discourages certain countries frominvesting in wind or solar power and continues theirrel iance on fossil fuels. Greenwashing by the publicrelations industry has all but camouflaged theunprecedented historical outcomes of planetarygenocide, ecocide, zoocide and epistemicide. We can’ttrust sustainabil ity efforts to be placed in the hands ofSTEM (science, technology, engineering andmathematics). What we need, according to RichardKahn, Sam Fassbinder and Anthony Nocella, is a criticalintervention by visionary educational leaders who arewil l ing to going together with social movements, in orderto transfigure the relationship between the school andthe society as part of a larger struggle for l iberation.

Kahn, Nocella and Fassbinder argue forceful lythat education for sustainabil ity must take on theinsurgent standpoints of mil itant research that aredemanded by ecopedagogy. Ecopedagogy, in turn, isviewed as an affi l iated movement-of-movements thataims to explicate the qualitative differences within theacademy between capital ist and related oppressiveforms of discipl inary ‘greenspeak’ and democratic anddisruptive forms of ecological discipl inarity. Kahn, Nocellaand Fassbinder do an excellent job of critiquing thepredominant forms of sustainabil ity taught in universitieswhich have to do with environmental sustainabil ity taughtin departments of environmental science andenvironmental studies and dealing with ecology, resourcemanagement and environmental economics. Here wesee a polarization emerging between sustainabil ity asscience and sustainabil ity as justice and equity. So, asKahn notes, we have environmental l iteracies in the

university antiseptical ly cleaved from issues of culturaland l inguistic democracy, indigenous sovereignty andhuman rights. The critical ecopedagogy ofscholar/activists such as Richard Kahn, Sam Fassbinder,Tina Evans, and David Greenwood operates within anoveral l dialectics of justice in which environmental justiceand ecological justice (the former relating to the unequaldistribution of harmful environments between people andthe later referring to the relationship between humansand the rest of the world). Kahn rips a U.S.Environmental Protection Agency report that l ists arepresentative sample of 1 75 academic institutions thatregularly violate the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act,the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-KnowAct, the Resource Conservation Recovery Act, the ToxicSubstance Control Act, the Federal Insecticide,Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, to name just a few.Kahn, Nocella and Fassbinder also argue that grossindustrial pol lution is both a major social and biologicalharm that disproportionately affects the poor and peopleof color, as well as being a primary contributor to theruination of the land and destruction of species diversity.So definitely, pol lution needs to be a thematic focal pointof school curricula. So yes, we do need ecopedagogy.

JMBT: In Global Education Magazine we workevery day to achieve worldwide social justice.It enables us to initiate an era of brotherhoodbetween all human beings in order to enrichmutually and in which any person in the worldwill be snatched away their dignity. Can yougive us any advice?

PM: History is a mirror that reflects who we are by howwe engage and interact with others. History reflects ourown agency back at us and calls into question our abil ityto transcend ourselves. Your goal of creating a globalbrotherhood and sisterhood is a necessary means offorming structures of dissent. Only through the creation

of a culture of contestation can we hope to transform theworld. I would only say, stand steadfast in what you arealready doing and try not to lose resolve. Capital ism istrying to restore the conditions of its reproduction bydestroying you, by destroying the value of your laborpower. The rate of global exploitation is increasingexponential ly. We cannot sanitize the present. Peasantsare being driven from the countryside of their ancestorsinto the cities to be used as cheap labor. Stand withthem. Factories are being shut down and recuperated byworkers. Stand with them. Throughout the advancedcapital ist world, unions are under assault. Stand withthem and encourage them to be truly 'tribunes of theoppressed. ' Indigenous groups are fighting to reclaimtheir land and their rights. Stand with them. Prisons arefi l l ing up with capital ism's racial ized 'surplus' population.Stand with these victims of injustice. Women are arebeing raped with impunity and forced to bear the worstburdens of capital ist super-exploitation. Stand with them.Stand with the victims of war, with those who aredisabled, with those who are losing hope, with those arelosing faith that another world is possible. Capital ismcannot escape the gravity of its hubris, and if it is busyreconstituting itself, so must the revolutionary self-activityof the oppressed meet it in stride by rekindl ing thesocial ist imaginary. Luchar hasta vencer.

JMBT: And finally, do you have any additionalcomments for our readers?

PM: I t is gratifying for me to have the pleasure of makingyour acquaintance through the pages of this courageousmagazine. We all share more than what divides us. Wecan be a unifying force for change. Together, we can turnpossible futures into tangible realities that can liberate usfrom the chains that make us as much as we make them.We have the power to break our chains. But it wil l takemore than one fist to hold the hammer. And more than




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one heart to give us the courage to grip the handle firmly.I bel ieve it is important to remember that with every cul-de-sac we face in human history, we have the possibi l ityof creating a new horizon of hope and the chance tomove foreword. Thinkers such as István Mészáros,Paulo Freire, Peter Hudis, Michael A. Lebowitz, MartaHarnecker, John Bellamy Foster, Carl Boggs, RamonGrosfoguel, E. San Juan, Joel Kovel, Jan NederveenPieterse, Wil l iam I . Robinson, Kevin Anderson, HenryGiroux, Bertel l Ol lman and many others have beentheorizing about changes that need to be made to makethe world a more livable and humane place. As MichaelLebowitz put it so aptly, social ism requires socialownership of the means of production and socialproduction organized by workers for the purpose ofmeeting the needs of society. In other words, realhuman development wil l require social ist productionorganized by workers and this, of course, requires asociety that undertakes production directly andconsciously for the needs of society. I t is up to us tobegin the task of building such a society. My role hasbeen to excavate the ways in which educators can play apart in this process. I am not interested in makingeducation more effective, or efficient, or smooth-running,or successful. I t is already too successful. But what is itsuccessful at doing? That is the question that hauntsthis generation and all preceding generations. In itspresent form, education is successful at creating theconditions of possibi l ity for capital ism to reproduce itself.My job is to disturb this process and help re-direct thepurpose of education to rebuilding a democratic social istalternative to capital ism. Rebuilding such an alternativeis not the call for a blueprint. Especial ly not one forged inthe crucible of Western imperial culture. I am reminded ofa story about Gandhi. In 1 931 , during a conference heldin London, Gandhi was asked by a British journalist whathe thought of Western civi l ization. “I think it would be agood idea,” he replied. What a social ist future wil l lookl ike is to be determined by those who are struggl ing for it.The struggle for social ism can always turn into its

opposite. And this is precisely why we need to thinkcritical ly about where we should be headed and how weshall get there.

"Peter McLaren and Paulo

Freire´s statue at Chapman

University, California, USA."




Critical Pedagogy Against Capitalist Schooling Towards a Socialist Alternative. an Interview With...

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