Rejoinder to Aaron Cooley's Review of Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

Because of Professor Cooley's prosecutorial review, I want to make clear at the outset that my rejoinder is not a codefendant's answer to a plaintiff's replication. Instead, I first attempt to provide an “immanent” analysis of Cooley's indictment, in the sense of dealing with what dwells within his reasoning. A specific philosophical definition of “immanent” reads: taking place within the mind of the subject, but having no effect outside (this does not apply to me as an outsider). I intend to battle with Cooley up close—no “dancing”—my defense against his offense. In the second part, the focus will be on what I think is missing from Cooley's attempt to discredit McLaren and Farahmandpur's book. His decision or failure to deal with what Marx and the most effective Marxists have written, and how some of this provided analyses that could be and/or was acted upon, may be more serious than his beating up on the book's authors.

Notes

Notes

1. From the preface: “[T]he young Marx's theory of revolution –the philosophy of praxis, and, dialectically linked to it, the idea of workers' self-emancipation – remains the best compass to find one's way in the confused historical panorama. Not only has it not been made obsolete by the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, but on the contrary, it provides us with a decisive key to understand why the attempt to ‘build socialism’ without the people (or against the people), to ‘emancipate’ labor from above, by an authoritarian bureaucracy power, was inevitably doomed to failure. For Marx, revolutionary democracy – the political equivalent of self-emancipation – was not an optional dimension but rather the intrinsic nature of socialism itself, as the free association of individuals who take into their hands the production of their common life…. This does not mean that one can find in Marx the answers to all our problems, or that there is nothing to be reconsidered or criticized in the complex body of his economical or political views.… This is why Marx's legacy has to be completed with the contributions of modern Marxists, from Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky to Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, from Lenin and Gramsci…. It is precisely because it is not a dogmatic and closed system, but an open and critical tradition of revolutionary theory and praxis, that Marxism is able to grow and develop itself … [including] learning from other experiences and other emancipatory movements” (p. viii).

2. “Marx sees the modern working class [I do not think there can be much of a post-modernism when there is no post-capitalism] as an immense worldwide community waiting to happen. Such possibilities give the story of organizing a permanent gravity and grandeur. The process of creating unions is not just an item in interest-group politics but a vital part of … ‘the education of the human race.’ And it is not just educational but existential: the process of people, individually and collectively, discovering who they [we] are. As they learn … they will come to see that they need one another in order to be themselves. They will see, because workers are smart: bourgeois society has forced them to be, in order to survive its constant upheavals. Marx knows they will get it by and by” (p. 264). I might add that the powers that be and those who serve them have always made it difficult for workers (primary producers) to understand the unfair, unjust, undemocratic system in which we labor. Various forms of schooling have been part of this Plato's cave project.

3. This passage from the introduction to Democracy Against Capitalism speaks volumes counter to what Cooley's politics seem to be about. Wood has helped to understand that deep and bona fide democracy is incompatible with capitalism. See my: A Radical Democratic Critique of Capitalist Education, Peter Lang, 1994. According to Wood: “In a fragmented world composed of ‘de-centered subjects’, where totalizing knowledges are impossible and undesirable, what other kind of politics is there than a sort of de-centered radicalization and intellectualized radicalization of liberal pluralism. What better escape, in theory, from a confrontation with capitalism, the most totalizing system the world has ever known, than the rejection of totalizing knowledge? What greater obstacle, in practice, to anything more than the most local and particularistic resistances to the global, totalizing power of capitalism than the de-centered and fragmented subject? What better excuse for submitting to the force majeure of capitalism than the conviction that its power, while pervasive, has no systemic origin, no unified logic, no identifiable social roots? In opposition to this dominant trend, I propose to start from the premise that the critique of capitalism is urgently needed, that historical materialism still provides the best foundation on which to construct it, and the critical element in Marxism lies above all in the insistence on the historical specificity of its systemic logic and… historicity. In other words, historical materialism approaches capitalism in a way exactly opposite to the current fashions: the systemic unity of capitalism instead of post-modern fragments, and also historicity – and hence, the possibility of supersession – instead of capitalist inevitability and the end of History” (pp. 2-3).