Policy Futures in Education

ISSN 1478-2103

Volume 2 Numbers 3 & 4 2004

CONTENTS

[click on author's name for abstract and full text]
 

SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE
Theme: MARXIST FUTURES
Michael A. Peters. Editorial. Marxist Futures: knowledge socialism and the academy, pages 435‑438
Simon Marginson. A Revised Marxist Political Economy of National Education Markets, pages 439‑453
Mark Olssen. Foucault and Marxism: rewriting the theory of historical materialism, pages 454‑482
Zeus Leonardo. The Unhappy Marriage between Marxism and Race Critique: political economy and the production of racialized knowledge, pages 483‑493
Henry A. Giroux. Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neo-liberalism: making the political more pedagogical, pages 494‑503
Dave Hill. Books, Banks and Bullets: controlling our minds – the global project of imperialistic and militaristic neo-liberalism and its effect on education policy, pages 504‑522
Mike Cole. ‘Rule Britannia’ and the New American Empire: a Marxist analysis of the teaching of imperialism, actual and potential, in the British school curriculum, pages 523‑538
Eric J. Weiner. The Work of Power and the Power of Work: teaching for class consciousness in the neo-liberal age, pages 539‑554
John Freeman-Moir. Turning towards History: turning towards Utopia, pages 555‑564
Glenn Rikowski. Marx and the Education of the Future, pages 565‑577
Tom Steele & Richard Taylor. Marxism and Adult Education in Britain, pages 578‑592
Heinz Sünker. Education and Reproduction of Social Inequality: German politics and sociology of education, pages 593‑606
David Hursh. Undermining Democratic Education in the USA: the consequences of global capitalism and neo-liberal policies for education policies at the local, state and federal levels, pages 607‑620
Michael A. Peters. Citizen-Consumers, Social Markets and the Reform of Public Services, pages 621‑632
Mike Cole. US Imperialism, Transmodernism and Education: a Marxist critique, pages 633‑643
David Geoffrey Smith. A Reply to Mike Cole, pages 644‑645 VIEW FULL TEXT
Sina Rahmani. Rebel without a Pause: an interview with Henry Giroux, pages 646‑651
Liam Kane. Influences Affecting the Development of Socialist Beliefs: a report on research in progress, pages 652‑654 VIEW FULL TEXT

REVIEW ESSAY
Michael A. Peters. American Conservative Identity Politics: Huntington on Who Are We?, pages 655‑657 VIEW FULL TEXT

BOOK REVIEW
Performance Management in Education: improving practice (J. Reeves, C. Forde, J. O’Brien, P. Smith & H. Tomlinson), reviewed by Don Macintyre, pages 658‑660 VIEW FULL TEXT

Editorial. Marxist Futures: knowledge socialism and the academy

Marxism, we are told by politicians and the popular press, is dead. The Left, as a historical movement tied to the labour movement, is frozen over, caught between the collapse of actually existing communism in Eastern Europe and the triumph of global market forces. Union membership in the traditional industrial economy in the United Kingdom is dwindling as multinationals relocate offshore; even insurance, information, banking and call-centre jobs of the ‘new economy’ are increasingly outsourced to India and other emergent economies literate in information and computing technology and English. China has joined the World Trade Organization and committed itself to a post-socialist market economy. At a time of an intensification of inequalities between regions and, perhaps more significantly, between North and South – between the developed world and the developing world – the Left in Britain, the USA and most of Europe seems ideologically gutted by the Third Way preoccupation with the social market and with citizenship ‘responsibilities’ rather than with traditional concerns of equality and advancing rights. The best offer on hand seems to be a socialisation of the market and an acknowledgement of its moral limits. The age of privatisation reduces the state’s role more and more to one of regulation, rather than provision or funding of public services. The US–UK neo-liberal model of globalisation has dominated the world economy and world politics for the last 20 years, defining the present crisis of fundamentalisms and restyling imperialism as a new age of barbarism. In this age, American-style democracy is exported alongside the ideology of ‘free trade’. Yet many Americans have shifted their view since the Vietnam War on whether the USA is a force for good in the world or an imperialist power, and this is so despite Bush’s recent election victory. Even the philosophers of ‘68 have given way to a new breed of fashion-conscious savants, who now turn their attention to extolling the virtues of liberal individualism or sneer at the last great generation of Left-Nietzscheans, such as Foucault and Derrida.

The Left has certainly been marginalised and even in the home of European socialism it seems confused and crisis-ridden. Europe itself is fighting to establish a new identity, reshaping its territory through enlargement and integration, and desperately competing with the US juggernaut of global power and the rising stars of East Asia –not only China, but also Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea – which seem destined to develop a trading bloc at least as powerful as that of the USA and the European Union. The traditional Left, wedded to the rise of the industrial working class, some observers have remarked, is also tied to its demise. Is the Left history? Has it simply become an academic form of analysis or does it have the seeds to reconfigure itself as an organising force once again?

In terms of emancipatory futures there are all sorts of oppressions to overcome; many of these oppressions have intensified in the neo-liberal era. The question that Steve Brier asks is:

How do we position ourselves as a movement in relation to all the particular forms of oppression experienced by specific communities and people, defined by race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, etc., especially at a time when no unified working-class movement exists that encompasses these communities and fights to eradicate the special injustices they face? (Brier, 1999)

The question of unity becomes paramount. Against identity politics and certain forms of postmodernism we need to inquire: what is the unifying principle? Is it the concept of ‘class’ or even an overlapping set of concepts? Brier was writing at a time that had not yet seen the neoconservative hegemony in the White House or its consolidation after the re-election of Bush for a second term. In this environment of vote fraud and corporate corruption it is difficult to see the flourishing of social democracy even though the White House wants to export American-style democracy to the world as part of its neoconservative agenda.

In these circumstances is it really enough to talk of ‘beyond left and right’ as the future of radical politics as Tony Giddens (1994) has done? Or does Alex Callinicos’s (2003) Anti-Capitalist Manifesto define a way forward?

These are weighty questions that do not admit easy answers. But it is clear that even in this environment of world politics there are new lines of struggle emerging that coalesce with the old articles of faith. There are expressions of new forms of socialism, for instance, that revolve around the international labour movement and invoke new imperialism struggles based on the movements of indigenous and racialised peoples. There are active social movements, perhaps less coherent but every bit as powerful as older class-based movements, such as the anti-capitalism, anti-globalisation movements, women’s and feminist movements, and environmental movements. These new expressions do require engagement and retheorising by the Left. One obvious challenge for Marxism and the Left more generally is its engagement with Islam and the enslavement of women.

There is also a host of struggles around the socialisation of the market and a question of whether this can be pursued successfully at the level beyond the state. Indeed, as many theorists have asserted, the future of the Left is tied up with the future of world democracy and with the development of left media cultures and centres. Part of the success of the Right has been its ability to privatise thinking and media, moving beyond the academy to set up dozens of new think tanks, private consultancies, and media centres that propagate partisan ‘news’ or lobby and influence government departments at the highest levels.

One form of new expression concerns what I call knowledge socialism to indicate the new struggles surrounding the politics of knowledge that directly involve the academy and I do not mean simply refer to the role of theory. I am referring to what has been called knowledge in the age of ‘knowledge capitalism’, a debate that increasingly turns on the economics of knowledge, the communicative turn, and the emerging international knowledge system where the politics of knowledge and information dominates. One issue concerns intellectual property, not only copyright, patents and trademarks, but also the emergence of international regimes of intellectual property rights, and the accompanying emphasis on human capital and embedded knowledge processes that now drive university management.

In these discussions, issues of freedom and control reassert themselves at all levels: at those of content, code and information. This issue of freedom/control concerns the ideation and codification of knowledge and the new ‘soft’ technologies that take the notion of ‘practice’ as the new desideratum: practitioner knowledge, communities of practice, and different forms of organisational learning adopted and adapted as part of corporate practice. Indeed, now we face the politics of the learning economy and the economics of forgetting that insists new ideas have only a short shelf life. I am not sanguine about the easy adoption and co-option of these forms that often advertise themselves in terms of reflection but really focus on efficiency and turning a profit. These questions are also tied up with larger questions concerning disciplinary versus informal knowledge, the formalisation of the disciplines, the development of the informal knowledge economy, and the pervasiveness of informal education. Informal knowledge and education based on free exchange is still a good model for civil society in the age of knowledge capitalism.

We should remember that the rise of academic societies only dates from the late seventeenth century with the establishment of the Royal Society in Britain in 1660 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1780. The history of academic journals is also short and tied to this recent history. It is during this period that copyright also emerges. Whatever the encroachment of knowledge capitalism on the universities and higher education more generally, the free and frank exchange of ideas stills serves as a sound model of sociality and in this sense knowledge capitalism, I would argue, is parasitic on knowledge socialism for, as Marx, Wittgenstein and Bourdieu acknowledge, knowledge and the value of knowledge are rooted in social relations. In this premise is buried the future politics of knowledge both for the academy and for the developing world.

It is the case that Marxist theory has undergone a renewal in the West since the break-up of the Soviet system in 1989. It has undergone a revival and new developments have occurred in a variety of disciplines and fields. New forms of neo-Marxist thought have emerged such as the post-structuralist Marxisms from France, for example, Jacques Derrida’s (1994) Spectres of Marx or Terell Carver’s (1998) Postmodern Marx. In particular, a form of Marxism applied to the reading of texts has flourished in the university with the advent of cultural studies, and leading Marxist scholars like Terry Eagleton use Marx to analyse and explain the whole field of cultural endeavour. Other scholars have applied Marx again to a different capitalism from the nineteenth-century industrial capitalism with which Marx was familiar, such as Fredric Jameson’s (1991) Marxist analysis of the cultural logic of late capitalism or Meghnad Desai’s (2002) Marx’s Revenge. Others, like Alex Callinicos (2003) , have used Marx to explain globalisation and anti-globalisation. The 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto was the occasion for many of these reappraisals of Marx. In the field of education since Paulo Freire and Bowles & Gintis were writing in the 1970s, scholars in the tradition of critical theory and critical pedagogy, like Henry Giroux, Doug Kellner, Mike Apple and Peter McLaren, have kept alive the promise of political analysis of schooling as a form of cultural reproduction and resistance. And those working from traditional Marxist political economy, like Dave Hill, John Freeman-Moir and Heinz Sünker, have consistently utilised Marx as the basis of a critical sociology of education.

This themed double issue positions itself as ‘Marxist Futures in Education’. It looks to the future of Marxist analysis to both understand and change contemporary education and invent new forms of Marxist thought – in short, the future of Marxism as an open, developing and progressive research programme. It includes essays by scholars from the United Kingdom, Germany the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The first set of essays by Marginson, Olssen and Leonardo are theoretical in the sense that they seek to revitalise the foundations of traditional Marxist political economy, to rewrite the theory of historical materialism à la Foucault, or to examine the ‘unhappy marriage’ between Marxism and race critique. The next set of essays by Giroux, Hill, Cole and Weiner pursue the question of neo-liberalism as a public pedagogy and a global imperialistic project that can be pursued in the classroom. Freeman-Moir and Rikowski return to Marx to re-examine political education, the Marxian project, and the future of anti-capitalist education. This is followed by a set of essays that examine in historical and empirical terms adult education in Britain (Steele & Taylor), the reproduction of social inequality in German education (Sünker) and the consequences of neo-liberal policies for US education (Hursh). The essay by Peters picks up the theme of ‘citizen-consumers’ and the way in which Third Way politics has attempted to reform public services through the market. Cole provides a discussion of US imperialism, discussing via the notion of transmodernism an article by David Geoffrey Smith that was published in a previous issue of Policy Futures in Education; and Smith provides a response to Cole. There is also an interview with Henry Giroux and a report on an ongoing research project by Kane, plus two book reviews.

All in all, it is a substantial double issue that provides a series of thought-provoking and scholarly essays on Marxist futures. I thank all the contributors for their efforts in helping to develop this special double issue.

MICHAEL A. PETERS

University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

References

Brier, S. (1999) In: Roundtable on the Future of the Left. Available at: www.brechtforum.org/highlights/roundtable%20on%20the%20future%20of%20the%20 left.htm This transcript was published in Socialism & Democracy, a co-sponsor of the Manifestivity, in issue 25, Spring/Summer 1999).
Callinicos, Alex (2003) An Anti-capitalist Manifesto. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Carver, T. (1998) The Postmodern Marx. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international, trans. Peggy Kamuf, with an introduction by Bernd Magnus & Stephen Cullenberg. New York and London: Routledge.
Desai, M. (2002) Marx’s Revenge: the resurgence of capitalism and the death of statist socialism. London: Verso.
Giddens, A. (1994) Beyond Left and Right: the future of radical politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso.

A Revised Marxist Political Economy of National Education Markets

SIMON MARGINSON Monash University, Clayton, Australia

This article synthesises the social and economic dynamics of both non-market and market production in national education systems, drawing primarily on Marx’s analysis of the commodity and Hirsch on positional competition. Market production has six principal aspects: a defined field of production, protocols governing entry/exit, the production of scarce and individualised commodities, monetary exchange and price-based coordination, competition between consumers, and market subjectivities/behaviours. In national systems the dominant form of education continues to be a status competition led by elite institutions that in key respects do not behave like capitalist firms. Elite universities and schools do not expand to meet demand, but remain exclusive, maximising the value of the student places they provide. Their lodestone is not revenues, but social status and power. Revenues are means to the fulfilment of status objectives. Fully commercial education is mostly conducted in lower status institutions that are subject to the price cutting of quality in a ‘race to the bottom’. Nevertheless, fully commercial forms of education are gaining ground in national education systems, and still more at the global level in the cross-border education of foreign students and trade in intellectual property. The article examines the various kinds of educational commodity.

Foucault and Marxism: rewriting the theory of historical materialism

MARK OLSSEN University of Surrey, United Kingdom

This article explores the relationship of Foucault to Marxism. Although he was often critical of Marxism, Foucault’s own approach bears striking parallels to Marxism, as a form of method, as an account of history, and as an analysis of social structure. Like Marxism, Foucault represents social practices as transitory and all knowledge and intellectual formations as linked to social relations and power. In this he asserts the historical relativity of all systems and structures – of society, of thought, of theory and of concepts, while at the same time not denying a materialism of physical necessities. Yet while Foucault’s approach reveals these important similarities to Marxism, the differences, claims the author, are fundamental. These concern his rejection of Hegel’s conceptions of history and society as a unified developing totality, his rejection of essences and teleology, and his rejection of any utopian impulse revolving around the laws of economic development or the role of the proletariat in history. Foucault’s own conception of change, in fact, is represented in ways that are altogether different to Marx’s approach, and ultimately supports localistic forms of resistance and specific forms of democratic incrementalism, rather than revolutionary or totalistic strategies as the basis of transforming society.

The Unhappy Marriage between Marxism and Race Critique: political economy and the production of racialized knowledge

ZEUS LEONARDO California State University, Long Beach, USA

In educational policy theory orthodox Marxism is known for its commitment to objectivism or the science of history. Race analysis is developed in its ability to explain the subjective dimension of racial oppression. The two theories are often at odds with each other. This article is an attempt to create a theory by integrating Marxist objectivism and race theory’s focus on subjectivity. As a result, both Marxism and race analysis are strengthened in a way that maintains the integrity of each discourse. This benefits educational policy theory because praxis is the dialectical attempt to synthesize the inner and external processes of schooling.

Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neo-liberalism: making the political more pedagogical

HENRY A. GIROUX McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

Neo-liberalism has reached a new stage in the United States, buttressed largely by the almost seamless alliances formed among the Bush administration, religious fundamentalists, neo-conservative extremists, the dominant media, and corporate elites. This article explores the various ways in which neo-liberal cultural politics works as a form of public pedagogy to devalue the meaning of the social contract, education, and citizenship by defining higher education primarily as a financial investment and learning as a form of training for the workforce. Aggressively fostering its attack on the welfare state, unions, non-commodified public spheres, and any critical vestige of critical education, neo-liberal politics makes it increasingly more difficult to address the necessity of a political education in which active and critical political agents have to be formed, educated, and socialized into the world of politics. This article explores how the intersection of cultural studies and public pedagogy offers a challenge to both the ideology and practice of neo-liberalism as a form of cultural politics. In doing, so it outlines how the pedagogical can become more political in the classroom and how the political can become more pedagogical outside of the classroom via the educational force of the wider culture.

Books, Banks and Bullets: controlling our minds – the global project of imperialistic and militaristic neo-liberalism and its effect on education policy

DAVE HILL University College Northampton, United Kingdom

This article focuses on global trends in education policy during the current epoch of imperializing, militaristic, neo-liberal global capital. It is based on an analysis that global capital, in the form of dominant US multinational capital, together with its client governments, uses the repressive and ideological apparatuses of the state to advance its interests, and to marginalize, terrorize, weaken, or kill those who stand in its way. What we are seeing is class war from above – war by national and global capitalist classes against national and global working classes. The author identifies global and national characteristics of the ideological and repressive state apparatuses that impose (broadly neo-liberal) educational and wider social, cultural, economic, and fiscal policy as part of the hegemonic activity of US-led global neo-liberal capital. In particular, he examines the repression of critical thought and oppositional activity within the sites of teacher education, schooling, and university/higher education – the compression and repression of critical space in education today.

‘Rule Britannia’ and the New American Empire: a Marxist analysis of the teaching of imperialism, actual and potential, in the British school curriculum

MIKE COLE University of Brighton, United Kingdom

The author begins by arguing that in order to understand imperialism it is necessary to have a conceptual awareness of the concepts of racism and racialisation. He then considers how the British Empire impacted on schools during the imperial era. He goes on to examine the nature of the New Imperialism. Calls are currently being made by notable ‘establishment figures’ for the renewed teaching in schools of the history of Britain’s imperial past. He concludes that Marxists should endorse these calls and should argue for the teaching of imperialism to be extended to include an analysis of the New Imperialism.

The Work of Power and the Power of Work: teaching for class consciousness in the neo-liberal age

ERIC J. WEINER Montclair State University, USA

As workers throughout the globe struggle to gain control over the conditions in which they labor as well as the means by which capital is produced, the importance of understanding class struggle, class formation and class consciousness as they relate to education and schooling takes on a new urgency. In the early part of the twenty-first century, neo-liberal ideology persists in normalizing relations of capital, just as contemporary educational theory has tended to subrogate class struggle for social movement. As such, the category of class as a potent historical actor with specific temporal qualities suffers for legitimacy in an age characterized by end-of-history prophets and profiteers; ‘bio-identity’ movements; neo-corporate hegemony; quasi-sovereign nation-states; global financiers monetarily and ideologically supported by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization; increasing local and global disparities between wealth and poverty; and violence. A more comprehensive understanding of social class and education will not eradicate or transform all of these social realities. However, by erasing class as a historical actor, social and educational theorists as well as other political workers miss significant pedagogical opportunities to heighten class consciousness, create class formations, and enliven class struggle so that the future has an opportunity to become something other than what the present suggests it will be. But in an age characterized by a fear of freedom, radicalizing our thinking is a necessary step in imagining the possibility of collective struggle over a future that has yet to be determined.

Turning towards History: turning towards Utopia

JOHN FREEMAN-MOIR University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Turning towards history – to be contrasted with turning away from history – captures the Marxian sense of education. Marx worked out the elements of a theory of political education in relation to history by equating education with the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and people. This theory received its most comprehensive yet succinct and attractive expression in the Communist Manifesto. The Manifesto is used as a means of analyzing the foundations of political education – the circumstances of history, class struggle and Utopia – from a historical materialist perspective. These foundations, which define an educative view of history, remain necessary to the further development of Marxian educational theory and practice in the contemporary world.

Marx and the Education of the Future

GLENN RIKOWSKI University College Northampton, United Kingdom

With reference to Karl Marx’s writings on education, this article outlines the education of the future as anti-capitalist education. In starting out from a conception of communism as the ‘real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx), it is argued that the anti-capitalist education of the future consists of three moments: critique, addressing human needs and realms of freedom. It is also argued that all three moments are essential for an anti-capitalist education of the future, but the emphasis on particular moments changes (a movement from moment one to three) as capitalist society and education are left behind through social transformation. In the light of this framework, Marx’s views on the relation between labour and education, and his views on education run by the state, are critically examined. In the light of the preceding analysis, the article ends with a consideration of two trends that are gaining strength in contemporary education in England: the social production of labour-power and the business takeover of education. Political responses to these are briefly explored.

Marxism and Adult Education in Britain

TOM STEELE Associate Research Fellow, Universities of Glasgow, Warwick and Cambridge, United Kingdom
RICHARD TAYLOR Director of Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

In British adult education Marxism has been a persistent if marginalised current that has consistently informed its more radical movements and practitioners. This article firstly introduces some contested Marxist perspectives on adult education, particularly around the issues of ideology and incorporation into bourgeois society. Secondly, it examines the adult educational context, contrasting the themes of middle-class-provided ‘liberal’ adult education and ‘independent’ working-class education. It then focuses on the trajectories of workers’ education in the twentieth century and the contrasting roles Marxist education played in the Communist Party and the National Council of Labour Colleges up to the Second World War. In the post-war period the rebirth of community education in the 1960s and 1970s absorbed more cosmopolitan Marxist influence, such as those of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire. The article ends by assessing what remains of the Marxist tradition in the twenty-first century and the authors conclude that in a capitalist system that remains deeply unequal and globally exploitative, Marxism still offers a valuable framework of analysis through which adult educators may be able to engage in a dialogue with emergent social movements.

Education and Reproduction of Social Inequality: German politics and sociology of education

HEINZ SÜNKER University of Wuppertal, Germany

This article deals with central issues in the field of sociology and politics of education after the publication of the outcomes of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study for Germany. These outcomes serve to remind us of the old debate on politics of education in the 1960s. The main topic since then remains the reproduction of social inequality via education. Critical educational theory shows an alternative in conceptualizing education for all and in overcoming the three-tier system in Germany. This is necessary in the interest of a real democracy based on the abilities and competencies of an educated society.

Undermining Democratic Education in the USA: the consequences of global capitalism and neo-liberal policies for education policies at the local, state and federal levels

DAVID HURSH University of Rochester, USA

In the USA, many of the recent education reforms have been implemented in response to calls from neo-liberal and conservative policy makers to improve education efficiency and reduce public expenditures within an increasingly globalized economy. Consequently, local, state, and federal education policies increasingly employ curricular standards and high-stakes testing as a means of introducing competition and markets into education. Moreover, for some policy makers such reforms are the first step towards privatizing education through charter schools and vouchers programs. In this article the author analyzes the consequences such policies have had on the education system on three scales: the city of Chicago, the state of New York, and the US federal government. In particular, the reforms have shifted the control over education from the local to the state and federal levels. Further, the reforms have increased inequality between the advantaged middle-class and White students and the disadvantaged working-class students and students of color.

Citizen-Consumers, Social Markets and the Reform of Public Services

MICHAEL A. PETERS University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

In a paper presented in July 2003 to Labour’s National Policy Forum, the main policy-making body in the United Kingdom, Liam Byrne, a research associate of the Social Market Foundation, forecast the major problems that will face government in Britain in 2020. As reported in the Guardian (9 August 2003): ‘British national government weakened by a seepage of power to international bodies, faces a massive challenge to meet the demands of an ever more consumerist and distrustful public’. Pressures on existing services will increase and the National Health Service especially will be beset by demands from an ever more consumerist public. Not only will expectations of quality public services rise as public services users expect higher standards, but the public will also become less afraid to express dissatisfaction. Byrne predicts that, rather than explicit political power, the spread of power to lobby groups and the willingness of the public to express political views through customer choice will weaken the national government. With better information, access to experts on the Internet and better education, the public is both less deferential and more distrustful of politics and political institutions. The question has become whether the forces of consumerism, political cynicism and individualism in Western economic growth can be challenged or at least reshaped. This is the topic for this article, which in turn examines the construction of ‘citizen-consumers’ in relation to the concept of the social market, how it is underpinned by British Labour government policy and how it is prefigured as a basis of policy by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, for Labour’s next term in office.

US Imperialism, Transmodernism and Education: a Marxist critique

MIKE COLE University of Brighton, United Kingdom

The author begins by discussing David Geoffrey Smith’s analysis of the enantiomorphism inherent in the rhetoric of New American Imperialism. He goes on to examine critically Smith’s defence of Enrique Dussel’s advocacy of transmodernism as a way of understanding this enantiomorphism and of moving beyond what are seen as the constraints of both modernism and postmodernism. The author argues that transmodernism has purchase in analysing the genesis and genealogy of the New Imperialism. The author then offers a critique, from a Marxist perspective, of both postmodernism and transmodernism. He suggests that, in moving beyond the mere deconstruction of postmodernism, transmodernism is theoretically and practically more progressive than both non-Marxist forms of modernism and postmodernism. However, he suggests that, in rejecting all forms of totalising synthesis, transmodern analysis, like postmodern analysis, is ultimately conducive to capitalism. He also suggests that, since transmodernism’s agenda for change is solely analectical rather than dialectical, transmodernist proposals for change are not viable in the context of the current imperialist project. Turning to education in societies characterised by an enantiomorphism and enfraudening, he argues that, from a Marxist perspective, the role of education should be to transform schools from sites of misrepresentation and conformity to the needs of neo-liberal capitalism and imperialism into sites of social justice.

Rebel without a Pause: an interview with Henry Giroux

SINA RAHMANI McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

Henry Giroux discusses his recent move to Canada and the role of intellectuals in a democratic society. Giroux express deep concern for his colleagues in America, especially considering the recent reelection of George W. Bush and the growing attack on academia. Despite this, Giroux sees an opportunity for movements of opposition and social reform. Henry A. Giroux, a leading figure in the fields of critical pedagogy and cultural studies, recently came to McMaster University in Canada from Penn State University, where he taught for more than a decade. He is the author of more than 30 books and 250 journal articles. Sina Rahmani spoke to him in his Togo Salmon Hall office.

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