Pedagogy from and for Social Movements: A Conversation Between Theory and Practice

ABSTRACT

Much radical writing on academia is grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy would be “theory from above.” This article argues for a different understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; oriented towards practice; developmental and contested from below, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means starting from participants’ existing praxis and “learning from each other’s struggles”—using “frozen” movement theory and activist experience—to move towards a wider, more radical understanding. In Ireland such pedagogy is rooted in working-class community self-organising, rural environmental justice alliances, women’s and GLTBQ activism, and the anti-capitalist “movement of movements,” encapsulating Audre Lorde’s dictum, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The article focusses in particular on a “Masters for activists.” The course supports movement participants to deepen and develop their activist practice but also to situate it within these wider and more radical understandings and emancipatory alliances. Taking movement praxis—rather than “contemplative” knowledge—as a starting point raises very different questions about theory and practice, forms and distribution of knowledge and the purpose and shape of learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• Marxism
• learning and knowledge production
• popular education
• ecosocialism

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to colleagues and students on the MA for the shared learning drawn on here; to Ariel Salleh for disagreements which fed into this paper; to Sutapa Chattopadhyay for taking the initiative for this special issue; and to Salvatore Engel-di Mauro and two anonymous referees for CNS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Laurence Cox http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8464-0464

Notes

1 I have edited the translation to reflect the fact that Marx writes Menschen, “human beings,” not Männer, “men” as in this 1969 translation.

2 This was particularly true in the US and UK, which dominate present-day academic production and share a history of early and thorough neoliberal defeats of popular movements.

3 As Judith Watson observes (personal communication), this pedagogical focus on constraining structures contrasts with academic management's focus on “enabling change” in top-down ways.

4 This was brought home to the members of the Second and Third Internationals in the most brutal way, by the rise of fascism out of economic crisis. The point of Gramsci's politics was precisely that socialism was not inevitable—but neither was fascism: it was important to understand the process of collective agency, and not only in its positive aspects.

5 I have learned a lot from colleagues who are formally trained in radical education and refer to relevant literature as appropriate. However, my own interests lie in the analysis of learning and knowledge production processes within movements (e.g. Conway 2006). Research here typically has a somewhat different focus, paying more attention to the social conditions of learning (the nature of particular struggles, the role of knowledge within the movement etc.) at the expense of the specifics of classroom techniques and normative educational theories. There are of course substantial overlaps (e.g. Mayo 1999), but my interest here (as suits an ecosocialist pedagogy) is in the collective practice of pedagogy or self-education and the social relationships within which this takes place.

6 For a recent Marxist analysis along these lines see De Smet (2015).

7 For example, resistance to nuclear power was not led by local actors, given the far wider geographical threat and the longer history of radioactive pollution from the Windscale/Sellafield plant across the Irish Sea.

8 In particular, the anarchist Workers’ Solidarity Movement, whose website constitutes the single best resource for studying contemporary radical movements in Ireland: http://www.wsm.ie/collections.

9 On the wider pedagogical background see Marcos 2002 and Conway 2011.

10 Aspects of this experience are also discussed in Cox (2014a, 2015) from other perspectives.

11 Including labour, women's, GLTBQ, environmental, anti-racist and community development; the only significant exceptions are the anti-war and republican movements.

12 The course is run over two consecutive days to allow for work and caring responsibilities. Participants include employees (often on a part-time or contract basis) in movement organisations, activists who are either unemployed or hold a “day job” unconnected to their activism, and those in continuing education. Some participants improve their employment situation in movement contexts as a result of the course, but this is not its primary focus.

13 See Cox (2014b, 335–337) for discussion of how one student project found itself at the centre of national controversy over policing and gender.

14 The term “neoliberalism,” for example, has been generalised in popular usage in many countries because it makes effective links between different movements and communities.

15 An archive of projects is under development.

16 French riot police.