Comrade McLaren: A review of Pedagogy of Insurrection

Abstract

Peter McLaren’s Pedagogy of Insurrection offers a tour de force for educators and workers interested in finding a way out of a social universe that is becoming, with each passing day, increasingly savage, imprisoned, despoiled and dominated by an out-of-control finance capital. McLaren brings more than three decades of experience as an educator, activist, and global revolutionary to over four hundred pages of biting critique and capitalist-smashing analysis.

Peter McLaren’s Pedagogy of Insurrection offers a tour de force for educators and workers interested in finding a way out of a social universe that is becoming, with each passing day, increasingly savage, imprisoned, despoiled and dominated by an out-of-control finance capital. McLaren brings more than three decades of experience as an educator, activist, and global revolutionary to over four hundred pages of biting critique and capitalist-smashing analysis.

Armed with the insight that capitalism is not only an economic system, but also a political and cultural system that is grounded in a colonialist legacy of racism, sexism, etc., Pedagogy of Insurrection (McLaren, 2015) insists that educators must be challenged to view the world from ‘the perspective of those who are most powerless’ (McLaren, 2015: 141). What is so important about McLaren’s place of departure here is that it challenges critical educators to view the agents of revolutionary transformation as not just workers and the impoverished, but the most oppressed workers and the most impoverished communities due to their right to self-determination and as an indispensable way to ensure that life after capitalism is built, ‘in the interests of a more humane and just existence for all’ (McLaren, 2015: 141). Pedagogy of Insurrection’s emphasis on the examples of Socialist Cuba and Venezuela, of the historic Jesus of Nazareth, and of the indigenous Zapatista rebellion of central Mexico offer significant insights toward these ends.

Contributing to McLaren’s project here is the life and legacy of Harry Haywood. In a recently released abridged version of his autobiography, A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle, Haywood (2012) takes his readers on an enlightening journey of how he came to challenge both the bourgeois escapism of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist ‘back to Africa’ movement and the stultifying colorblindness of the ‘pure proletarian’ line of many white communists during the 1920s and 1930s (from the USA to South Africa). Most troubling for Haywood was that many of these communists, most of whom were white, especially in South Africa, tended to view any focus on race as a distraction to the socialist revolution against capitalism.

Directly influenced by comrades in the Soviet Union, Haywood came to argue that Black nationalism was a legitimate reaction of hundreds of thousands of African Americans to the super-exploitation of US imperialism – that is, for the desire for an independent existence. In the absence of a program advocating Black nationalism, Haywood argued that the Communist Party would continue to be unable to mobilize the tremendous revolutionary potential of American Blacks. Haywood therefore came to believe that Black nationalism, while atrophied after the wane of Garveyism, would emerge again during times of crisis and therefore needed to be rescued from potential counter-revolutionary utopians, by replacing the slogan of ‘back to Africa’ with ‘self determination in the deep South’ (Haywood, 2012: 143). Summarizing this line Haywood noted that, ‘our slogan for the US Black rebellion therefore must be the “right of self-determination in the South, with full equality throughout the country”, to be won through the revolutionary alliance with politically conscious white workers against the common enemy – US imperialism’ (Haywood, 2012: 143). Haywood then noted that he was the ‘first American Communist … to support the thesis that US Blacks constituted an oppressed nation’ (Haywood, 2012: 143).

Situated in the context of education, McLaren and Haywood’s insights emerge as a rejection of colonialist paternalism that situates the white educator as the agent of change; that is, as the liberator of the oppressed. Rather, the revolutionary leaders emerging from oppressed nations and national minorities are looked to as harbingers of what is to come. This approach requires a deep analysis of capitalism as a historically developing system, propelled by its own internal contradictions mediated by the agency of the capitalist class dialectically related to the agency of the producing and oppressed classes. That is, each antagonistically related class responding to and determined by the other. McLaren’s Pedagogy of Insurrection is an invaluable resource in advancing the revolutionary struggle to which comrade Haywood dedicated his life.

Just as Haywood brought clarity to the context of struggle during his era, McLaren also delivers lucidity to a critical pedagogy dominated by vague notions of economic justice and undirected objections to the undemocratic nature of neoliberalism. McLaren, that is, has replaced the slogan of ‘social justice’ with a Marxist critique of the capitalist-specific process of value production as the necessary focus of the movement against capitalism. McLaren’s revolutionary critical pedagogical project is therefore not just committed to bringing the readily visible consequences of capitalism into focus – that is, deepening immiseration – economic impoverishment – on one hand, and obscene opulence on the other – but it is interested in uncovering the internal logic of capital itself that acts as an external coercive force on even the class that brought it into existence; that is, the capitalist class.

However, adding to the complexity of the situation McLaren notes that while opulence is readily visible, its internal relation to poverty is less clear. For example, serving as an ideological smokescreen to the super-profits of financial capitalists is the highly publicized rising level of government debt and the accompanying savage cuts to public expenditures, including aid to children and public education. Consequently, workers and the unemployed are encouraged to view the source of their problems as stemming from too much government spending. Diverting attention away from the redistribution of wealth upwards, the true cause of growing poverty, immigrants and ethnic and racial minorities, in an outrageous act of bourgeois propaganda, are thus blamed for deteriorating social conditions.

Offering much needed clarity here McLaren’s focus on value production serves as the corrective lens bringing the true nature of capitalism, as a system of compounding growth in perpetual motion, into clear focus. McLaren begins by noting that producing value is not the same thing as accumulating wealth. The accumulation of wealth can be achieved in any number of ways, including leveling increasingly heavy taxes on a population as in late feudalism, saving up one’s wages, or even robbing a bank. Producing new value capitalistically, on the other hand, is something quite different.

Marx spent decades, and wrote thousands of pages, solving this problem. The easiest way to explain how new value is produced capitalistically is to note that only human labor power is endowed with the special self-expansive property. That is, raw material and machinery can only have their own value preserved and transferred through the production process. It is human labor that is able to add new value to raw materials through the act of labor, which Marx (1867 [1967]) referred to as ‘productive consumption’. The way this works is that the price of one’s labor must be lower than the value it produces during the time it is set in motion, if new or surplus value is to be produced. If a worker is paid one hundred dollars for 8 hours of work, then it must take fewer than 8 hours of work for the laborer to produce the value equivalent of one hundred dollars. Let’s say it takes four hours of labor for the laborer to produce the value equivalent of one hundred dollars, then the remaining four hours of labor are surplus labor hours, which go not to the producer, the worker, but to the purchaser of the human commodity, the capitalist. In this transaction the possessor of one hundred dollars laid out in wages receives in return two hundred dollars, one hundred of which is surplus value, or profit, or new value.

For McLaren, then, the objective of a revolutionary pedagogy is not to make the workers aware of the rate of exploitation in order to reduce it to make capitalist production relations more equitable; but, rather, the objective is to abolish exploitation altogether, which means ensuring every hour of work is requited and that requires de-privatizing the means of production and the system of nature. If exploitation and privatization are abolished, then the capitalist ceases to have the capacity to be a capitalist – that is, to create new value capitalistically, which requires a rate of exploitation and a working class dependent on a wage to survive. ¹ Armed with such deep insights – insights that go to the root cause of human suffering in the capitalist era – which are only exacerbated by racialization serving the capitalist well, by depressing the overall value of labor thereby inflating the rate of exploitation, especially for workers of color, the critical pedagogue is able to pose serious challenges to their students in terms of solving the problem of how to get out of capitalism. This vision of an anti-imperialist education which takes the self-determination of the Black nation within the US, for example, as an indispensable component, is a far cry from the corporatized education that dominates the capitalist world today.

The situation for public education is so severe that, McLaren argues, ‘education is now a subsector of the economy’ and ‘on a fast track to privatization’ (McLaren, 2015: 376). Less than a decade ago educational historians would have argued that such statements were doomsday exaggerations. Today, however, the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore. The education industry, as McLaren highlights, is one of the largest markets and is controlled by banks, hedge fund managers and financial speculators, and lavishly invested in by such corporate giants as the Walton family. McLaren also highlights the incessant drive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to replace more and more US inner city schools with Charter schools. Most outrageously, McLaren notes that some for-profit corporations have even created ‘non-profit foundations to obtain charters and then hire themselves to run the schools’ (McLaren, 2015: 377). The for-profit model leads to de-unionization, a dramatic reduction in the average age of the teaching force, increased class sizes and standardized testing instruments, which leaves teachers less experienced and less capable of mounting effective counter-offensives.

While teachers are clearly toiling under increasingly restricted and de-unionized conditions, teachers’ unions remain the largest and most powerful unions in the USA. For example, as I write this review (October 2016)teachers in Chicago are on strike in protest over unyielding funding cuts. Teachers across the USA are therefore clearly still in the fight. Hundreds, if not thousands, of critical educators continue to engage students in an approach to knowledge production that respects their experiences and encourages the development of a critical agency where a collective consciousness committed to social transformation is fostered. In the process, students move from being passive receivers of knowledge and the world to active creators and transformers of social existence. However, McLaren is not under the illusion that education alone can transform capitalist production relations into socialist ones.

The transformation of the state from the ground up, according to McLaren, is imperative to the project of defeating the capitalist class. Open to new possibilities of anti-capitalist praxis, Pedagogy of Insurrection embraces both sides of a common debate. That is, on one side, Chavistas argue that the taking of state power is a necessary component of creating a socialist alternative to capitalism. On the other side, the Zapatistas adopt an anti-statist position committed to creating an alternative form of social organization that will lead to the redundancy of capital and its state apparatus. While I personally take the Leninist (1917 [2015]) position that the bourgeois state must be smashed and replaced with a temporary proletarian state that cannot begin to wither away until all internal and external counter-revolutionary forces are defeated, McLaren’s Pedagogy of Insurrection remains open on this question.

Just as Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidate campaign revealed the millions upon millions of Americans who are in favor of at least the idea of a socialist alternative to capitalism, even though Sanders’ project was actually social democracy and not socialism, Pedagogy of Insurrection will prove an invaluable tool for educators and the public in general as we deal with the serious pedagogical and tactical questions associated with the fact that the idea of socialism has mass working-class appeal in the center of global capitalist power. Given that the Sanders campaign gave way to and was thus defeated by the Democratic corporate machine, the challenge now will be to problematize socialism post-Sanders in the coming years. Just as the depression and cynicism in the aftermath of Obama’s promises of hope and change caused pedagogical challenges, so too will the defeat of Sanders. If Sanders had somehow become the next President of the United States new challenges would have arisen stemming from the persistence of the bourgeois state despite a Sanders’ Presidency and the fact that the class that rules would continue to be the capitalist class. The millions of people who want socialism will have to come to terms with the fact that we will still not have socialism. This will pose a challenge: how do we develop capitalism into socialism? In this vulnerable moment of uncertainty, Pedagogy of Insurrection will be an invaluable resource for advancing the struggle and subverting the lure of cynicism.