Back in 2012 I suggested that, at least at the Federal level (and indeed elsewhere, with a few exceptions), American politics was dominated by two types of conservatives: the anti-public conservatives, who seek to deny the concept of a public (and who are exemplified by the Tea Party), and the corporate conservatives, the neoliberals who seek to buy off the public as cheaply as possible while government remains a prop for corporate profit rates. Today American government is a subsidiary of entrenched wealth. Billionaires make our policy, and campaign treasuries escalate with each election cycle as corporations increasingly recognize government as the only investment that pays in spades. “Revolutionists” appear in tiny, sectarian parties, a vanguard without followers or visible causes.
Now, of course, there are plenty of people in America who call themselves “liberals” or “progressives,” and identify with “the Left.” Yet we are justified in questioning the category of “the Left”—which dates back to the seating of members of the French Constituent Assembly in the early phase of the French Revolution—in an America dominated by neoliberalism. Today it appears that democracy has triumphed nearly everywhere; yet at the same time, dominant economic power remains in the same hands regardless of whom is elected, and the question asked each election remains boringly the same: shall society regress openly, or will our politicians pretend to “hold the line” while continuing to offer government as a catering service to dominant corporate power?
Let me suggest, however, that there is a third group—beyond the two conservative groups I’ve mentioned above—that persists even if we count as true the thesis of Chris Hedges in
Death of the Liberal Class
, which is what this review has followed so far. Between the sectarians, whose belief is about being who they are, and the sellouts, who can’t change the world because of who they’ve become, “the Left” appears as potential, present in discourse but absent in political power. There is a third group: brilliant in philosophy but insufficient in numbers for action. Here, I will call this group “people searching for the exit door to the Matrix.” They would be radicals if they were granted a chance to make their radicalism real. To the extent that such a group is politically effective, it acts to create and draw communities to political visions outside of the capitalist norm. There will be no individual escape from the Matrix. Peter McLaren is definitely in this group, and his newest book
Pedagogy of Insurrection
reads as a furious search for the exit door to the Matrix, using every means available or possible. If you are in this third group, and you like a good read (this is the man Joe Kincheloe dubbed the “poet laureate of the educational Left”), this book is for you.
McLaren himself is an incredibly busy guy, pursuing activist efforts around the world while at the same time holding down a teaching job at Chapman University in Orange, California, and continually adding to his publication record (with dozens of books to his credit). In that regard, since McLaren is the poet laureate of the educational Left, perhaps it would be best for readers to imagine
Pedagogy of Insurrection
as a 400-page “Howl,” a testament to the heartfelt need to escape the Matrix using any and every means possible. (Given McLaren’s strong identification with what remains of the international Left, we can, I suppose, respect McLaren’s claim to be part of it.) Pedagogy of Insurrection is also an encyclopedia of insurrection, naming radical movements various and sundry. McLaren’s search for a way out of the existing order is concrete as well as poetic, as he suggests on page 155:
Youth protesters today are struggling for participatory forms of association using new social media and new convergent media production as digital tools, as technological literacies to educate themselves and their comrades to link their experiences of struggle to goal-directed actions. They are struggling for different forms of social life. Here the digital media do not become ends in themselves but augment or supplement real-world experiences of struggle for popular sovereignty—and in the case of the Zapatistas in Chiapas or the Purépecha nation in Cherán, Mexico, an autonomous community within the state. As a result of these struggles, these tools become more integrated as part of an effort to create a collective intelligence with multiple visions of a socially just, fairer world.
There is an introduction titled “Out of the Rubble, Staking A Claim”, fifty-two pages long, which lays out the themes of this book. From there, five chapters are laid out in thematic order: Comrade Jesus, Comrade Freire, Comrade Chavez (with Mike Cole), Comrade Fidel, and Comrade Che. There are two big interviews and a number of other chapters illustrative of revolutionary critical pedagogy past these chapters. Perhaps the most direct introduction to Peter and his oeuvre, though, is in the interview with Sebastjan Leban:
Sebastjan Leban: On your webpage you state that critical pedagogy, which you support and practice, advocates non-violent dissent, the development of a philosophy of praxis guided by a Marxist humanism, the study of revolutionary social movements and thought and the struggle for socialist democracy, which is diametrically opposite to the current neoliberal democracy. Can we say that you as a critical educator are basically leading a fight against a neoliberal global capitalist valorization of education?
Peter McLaren: Yes, that would be a very fair description. (p. 225)
Some unpacking may be necessary for audiences here: Marxist humanism is a post-capitalist political movement guided by the ideal of a union of free producers—which is to say that instead of having a society that generates “value” for a super-rich few while it subsists upon wages, everyone produces something for human need (what is called “use-value”), and everyone controls both the process and the results of their production. Critical pedagogy is (according to Wikipedia) “a praxis-oriented” educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action.”
In short, Peter McLaren hopes to teach his way into a better world. The philosophy of praxis is the idea that we can create a theory that will guide human action, ultimately leading to a better world. But “praxis” doesn’t mean the theory that guides action today. The present-day theory guiding macro-level human action is that of neoclassical (i.e. neoliberal) economics, which imagines people as “maximizers of utility” (consumers and workers) participating in “free markets.” Perhaps its application counts as “praxis” for the world’s movers and shakers, whether they be participants in the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, or the various Gs, from the G-7 to the G-20, or to those ideologically aligned with such an economic vision of humanity; the rest of us are merely trapped in the world they direct. This review hopes to explain how McLaren’s book is organized as an insurrection against such a reality.
The introduction to
Pedagogy of Insurrection
starts with an important explanation of why revolutionary critical pedagogy offers a meaningful intervention in an era in which education has become an aid to the pursuit of value which drives its primary actors. Peter says: “Those who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should keep quiet about the barbarism we are witnessing all around us (p. 6).” Or, more complexly:
This is why we need to locate all human experience in a world-historical frame, that is, within specific social relations of production. Revolutionary critical pedagogy, as we have been trying to develop it, attempts to create the conditions of pedagogical possibility that enable students to see how, through the exercise of power, the dominant structures of class rule protect the practices of the powerful from being publicly scrutinized as they appropriate resources to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many. (p. 10)
Even more optimistically, from page 32:
A critical pedagogy is about the hard work of building community alliances, of challenging school policy, of providing teachers with alternative and oppositional teaching materials. It has little to do with awakening the “revolutionary soul” of students—this is merely a re-fetishization of the individual and the singular under the banner of the collective and serves only to bolster the untruth fostered by capitalist social relations and postpone the answer to the question: Is revolution possible today? It falls into the same kind of condition that critical pedagogy had been originally formulated to combat. It diverts us from the following challenge: Can we organize our social, cultural and economic life differently so as to transcend the exploitation that capital affords us?
The worth of a revolutionary critical pedagogy is revealed in that last sentence—you can’t know the answer if you don’t ask the question. The first chapter, “Comrade Jesus,” lays out McLaren’s fundamental philosophy before proceeding to a discussion of Christian communism. Toward the end of this chapter McLaren lays out a Christian theology of class struggle, exemplifying Jesus as communist, which leans heavily upon the writings of Jose Porfirio Miranda. In the second chapter, “Comrade Freire,” McLaren engages us with a discussion of the difficulties of teaching a pedagogy based on class struggle. McLaren connects Freire’s approach to the way through:
For Freire, an important task for critical educators is to grasp, comprehend and generalize forms of resistance to oppression on the part of the oppressed (that is, resistance on the plane of immanence) and give some direction in challenging capitalism at its very roots with the purpose of offering an alternative social universe outside of capitalism’s value form (that is, creating a concrete utopia). Critical educators should not take a passive role when it comes to spontaneous struggles; instead, they should elicit from the workers an understanding of the meaning of their own everyday struggles. (p. 62)
The following chapters, “Comrade Chavez,” “Comrade Fidel,” and “Comrade Che,” point to ways of connecting past tries at revolution to present attempts at ways through. (Those who would criticize McLaren’s choice of icons should be pressed to name other ways forward.) There are two revelatory interviews, three if you count the “class struggle” chapter toward the end of the book, and a chapter on “ecopedagogy.” Ecopedagogy recognizes that the revolution will take place outdoors, and McLaren cites an innovative confluence of thinkers to bring an ecological perspective to what he calls “revolutionary critical ecopedagogy” (p. 309). Here McLaren shows, with salutary thoroughness, how innovative concepts such as “ecopedagogy” (the teaching of the various natures, human and extra-human) and “world-ecology” (the post-Cartesian study of the world and, within the world, capitalism) are basic extensions of a description of everyday life that should be familiar to readers of David Harvey, Richard Wolff, or any number of guest presenters on Pacifica Radio or the “Real News” web broadcasts.
There are also, it must be added, chapters on “music education for social justice,” on the current chaos in Mexico (written with the incredible Lilia Monzo), on class warfare, and on the emotional component of insurrection (“critical rage pedagogy.”) I’m not going to cover each of these chapters in detail here.
I will conclude by further connecting this book to the analysis I presented above. One of the primary, and prioritized, goals of global capitalism is “security.” The world is to be commodified because the ultimate result, for the capitalist, is “security,” which can mean financial security in retirement but which also means the security of the entire process of appropriation and commodification and the security of the political processes of the “new world order” as well. Because capitalism proliferates insecurities, however, job insecurities, resource insecurities, and political insecurities, “security” can never be achieved, which is why capitalism will never guarantee “value.”
Pedagogy of Insurrection
is full of repeated exposures of the general, total pretense to “security,” thus opening the currently-tiny hole in the Matrix a little wider. Get it and read it!
