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Foreword xi
E. SAN JUAN, JR .
Introduction 1
SHEILA MACRINE, DAVE HILL AND DEB OR AH KELSH
1 Cultureclass 6
DEB OR AH KELSH
2 Hypohumanities 39
TERESA L. EBERT AND MAS’UD ZAVARZADEH
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the ruling classes of the industrial-
ized world celebrated the end of class struggle and the proverbial immortality of the
capitalist world-system. But scarcely had its first decade ended when disaster struck.
Behind the illusion of a permanent market utopia lurked internal decay, a precipitous
meltdown. September 11, 2001 was just a portent of the impending breakdown. With
the slide of the US and the world economy into an unprecedented impasse, a crisis
reminiscent of the 1929 Wall Street crash, but much more all-encompassing given the
“flat world” of globalized finance capital, we are faced with a lesson that should have
been learned when Marx and Engels invoked the “specter” of revolution in their 1848
Manifesto – the lesson of class struggle as the necessary framework for understanding
world history and its laws of motion. It is one we need today in order to grapple with
and make sense of the contradictory currents and tendencies traversing our daily
lives, for which this book is a timely heuristic and guide.
The contemporary situation is indeed even worse than in 1929, or since World
War II (as Kevin Phillips observes [2008]). In her lead essay, Deborah Kelsh sums up
the sharpened class contradictions in the US and around the world hidden behind
pluralist, post- and neo-Weberian mystifications. Kelsh uses the astutely formulated
concept of “cultureclass” to denote the way in which the dominant ideology obscures
private property – that is, the private ownership of the vital means of production
and the private appropriation of material wealth (aggregated surplus value) produced
by workers – on which class exploitation is grounded. “Cultureclass” prevents the
people from acquiring the necessary knowledge of the totality of social relations of
production – a knowledge of the internal contradictions inherent in a crisis-ridden
capitalist society. This knowledge equals class consciousness, enabling a radical praxis
of critique to transform society. “Cultureclass” separates culture and plural identities
from their roots in “the inequitable binary relation of owning,” the foundation of
capitalist production and exploitation. Preventing a critical analysis of property
relations, “cultureclass” serves as the ideological instrument of finance-capital based
on the commodification of knowledge, culture, ideas, etc. for corporate profit and
capital accumulation. “Cultureclass” is the neoliberal privileging of minds detached
from labor, subordinating the call of every person’s “freedom from need” to the “free-
market” demands of status-obsessed consumerism.
Kelsh’s theorizing of “cultureclass” at the opening of this volume is crucial in
xii E. San Juan, Jr.
clarifying the seductive logic of neoliberalism for many educators, technocrats, and
professionals. Neoliberalism as the chief ideology of capitalist globalization and
the prevailing ethos of neoconservatism – a phenomenon described succinctly by
E. Wayne Ross and Greg Queen in their contribution here – has reconfigured the
landscape since the 1848 Communist Manifesto. But the basic nature of capitalism,
namely, the exploitation of labor-power and the private appropriation of social
wealth produced by the propertyless majority, remains intact, even while imperial
finance-capital has conserved and modified its earlier stages of merchant and indus-
trial capitalism. In this context, one asks: In what way has the ideological apparatus
of modern schooling, and education in general, which produces/reproduces class
relations (the social division of labor) changed over time? How can the established
structures of schooling be revolutionized so as to promote equality, social justice, and
a democratic socialist order? This book aims to provide a critique of the traditional
mode of schooling designed to reproduce class inequality and an exploration of how
to alter that system in an emancipatory anti-imperialist direction.
In 1960, at the height of US prosperity, Harold Benjamin expressed the main-
stream view of education as a basic social institution designed for two purposes: “the
conservation of sound traditional values, and the encouragement of innovation and
the creation of new concepts sufficient to serve the needs of a growing, changing cul-
ture” (375). While conserving the basic institutions, education adapts and modifies
them; thus, stability and change co-exist (Kozol 2006). On the whole, schools are
primarily meant to preserve the values and knowledge maintaining the status quo.
But somehow they aren’t doing the job well, so problems occur, as indicated by the
questions often discussed then: “Who shall be educated? Who shall teach? Who
shall control and support the schools? What shall be taught? How shall the teach-
ing be done?” (Benjamin 1960: 375). In 1940, Harvard University President James
Conant called on schools to promote “social equality” by diversifying programs to
produce not only scholars but also artists, craftsmen, those with “intuitive judgment
on practical affairs” (1940). After World War II, the support and buttressing of US
global ascendancy became the national goal. While many believe that the Soviet
Union’s launching of Sputnik rockets in 1957 triggered a progressive reorientation
in educational thinking, it was actually the profound sociopolitical upheavals of the
1960s that imbued Benjamin’s questions with new urgency. In 1969, those questions
were articulated in a libertarian, populist discourse by Neil Postman and Charles
Weingartner in Teaching as a Subversive Activity. But, while exhorting us to pursue crap
detection, their idea of the educated person – a flexible, tolerant, innovative “liberal
personality who can face uncertainty and ambiguity” – has morphed into the post-
modern indeterminate cyborg: the performative, hybrid, crap deconstructor! Their
retooling of education as a survival strategy for the nuclear-space age, a regulation
of the body-mind syndromes to cope with the rapidly changing environment of the
Cold War, is now a respectable Establishment propaedeutic, part of what Teresa L.
Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, in Chapter 2, would label a species of instrumentalist
“hypohumanities” (see also Ebert and Zavarzadeh 2008).
There is no mystery about the function and purpose of education in the United
States from its inception. It was always meant to serve the preservation and
Foreword xiii
reinforcement of capitalism since the nineteenth century. Howard Zinn (1980)
recounts how the public school system was designed to inculcate in the literate labor
force “obedience to authority” coincident with the rise of the corporate state. Citing
standard teacher training texts meant to transform “the child from a little savage
into a creature of law and order, fit for the life of civilized society,” Zinn reminds us
how loyalty oaths, teacher certification, textbook screening, and the requirement of
citizenship were introduced to control schooling – a “gigantic organization of know-
ledge and education for orthodoxy and obedience” that nevertheless provoked dissent
and protest (257–8). This historically defined efficacy of education (in its economic
structure and ideological content) as an institution for reproducing class inequality
and polarization of power has been acutely examined by Samuel Bowles and Herbert
Gintis in their instructive work, Democracy and Capitalism (1986).
Notwithstanding its vigorous critique of education as a tool of social integration,
legitimation and reproduction, a thesis much more rigorously argued by Pierre
Bourdieu in his wide-ranging sociocultural inquiries, Bowles and Gintis were unable
to fully argue for a radical transformation of education in a socialist direction. Their
failure inheres in their unquestioning positivist and empiricist research procedure,
heedless of the dialectical-materialist analytic deployed by Marxist thinkers such
as Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, and Paulo Freire, among others. As Madan
Sarup (1978) observes, Bowles and Gintis’ structuralist-functionalist method is
undialectical: not only does it ignore questions about knowledge (purveyed by the
curriculum, teacher training, etc.), but it is also blind to the “heterogeneity” of the
schooling process manifest in the ways in which learners interpret or make mean-
ing of what is going on, how they challenge and creatively react to their learning
environment. Citing Dewey’s parallel speculation on habit as both a creative and
active engagement with the world, Bourdieu (1992) warns against reviving the post-
Cartesian dualism of subject and object, spiritual consciousness and material action,
and other irreconcilable antitheses. Most US pragmatists (such as Richard Rorty and
Stanley Fish), however, have fallen into a chauvinist nominalism once denounced
by William James and Charles Sanders Peirce. Although not practicing pragmatists
or nominalists, Bowles and Gintis use a deterministic model that may reflect the
backwardness of the US political milieu. The use of such a model is a symptom
of intellectual marginalization. It does not take into account what Gramsci calls
“hegemony,” that is, the ideological mode of class domination through popular con-
sensus in civil society, and therefore fails to propose a strategy and vision of socialist,
national-popular counter-hegemony.
It is precisely this inadequacy of Bowles and Gintis’ project that a new postmod-
ernist generation of scholars would try to correct. One of the more provocative
inquiries intended to supplement, if not revise, the Marxist critique of capitalist
schooling is Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux’s Education Under Siege (1985).
After reviewing a rich archive of Marxist theorizing, Aronowitz and Giroux reject
what they consider its disabling flaw – its economism, scientism, historical reduc-
tionism, determinism, etc. – that discounts the primacy of culture which involves the
categories of gender, race, popular culture, and other concrete determinants shaping
consciousness and individual agency.
xiv E. San Juan, Jr.
Aronowitz and Giroux reject Marx, Engels, and the Western Marxists (Lukács,
Gramsci, Frankfurt Critical Theory), as well as the innovative paradigm of habitus/
habitat of Pierre Bourdieu, Althusser’s reproductive model, and so on. They invoke
the example of Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and other pro-
ponents of the new eclectic “social movements” as the correct path in fashioning a
critical pedagogy, a radical theory/practice of schooling, together with the organic
intellectuals who would emphasize agency, resistance, and an oppositional public
sphere. For Aronowitz and Giroux, critical literacy involves reinventing the con-
nections between knowledge and power sufficient to foster individual/collective
empowerment, democratic pluralism, and self-management. While both call for
dialectical linkages between structure and agency, stressing the need for creative
resistance and transformative struggles, they privilege the moment of subjectivity/
tactical moves over the concurrent moment of theoretical totalizing. They bypass
the complex mediations between seemingly disjunctive moments. In their anxiety
to rectify the mechanistic deviations of classical Marxism, they reduce praxis into
“activistism” (exemplified by the radical style of Saul Alinsky) and the goal of social
justice/equality into the empowerment of differences and singularities. In this they
anticipate the anarchist compromise of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire
(2000). Consequently, a mass-based liberatory socialist politics, not to speak of an
anti-imperialist politics of world revolution mobilizing oppressed “third world”
peoples and colonized nations in solidarity with the industrial proletariat of the
global North, completely disappears in such revisionist discourses.
We can explain Aronowitz and Giroux’s abandonment of the socialist cause by
way of the vicissitudes of the US left/progressive movement with the triumph of the
neoconservative reaction immediately after the end of the Vietnam War. In general,
specific historic realities limit the capacity and horizon of American leftist thought,
allowing space for crippling left/right opportunisms. Among others, the lack of a
viable labor-union tradition and the entrenched tenacity of a white-supremacist
ethos in the US public sphere may explain the distortions of historical-materialist
principles and the relapse into various kinds of pragmatist/empiricist solutions. That
is why dissenting academics continue to reaffirm their project of decentering author-
ity and the curriculum, preparing their students to be border crossers, critical public
intellectuals, “agents of civic courage” in a radical democracy (for example, Giroux
1996: 181–4). But there is no mention of the working class as a significant force for
overthrowing capitalism, much less initiating a socialist revolution. It is instructive
to contrast this trend with the popular literacy “mission” of the Bolivarian revolution
in Venezuela, a pedagogical experiment of historic significance for all anti-capitalist
militants (Harnecker 2005; Gott 2005).
This perverse return of former left-wing scholars to an elitist, “holier-than-thou”
position is thus confirmed by the erasure of the centrality of alienated labor, the
distinctive character of capitalist production relations, in critical pedagogy and social
analysis. Culture detached from crucial production relations, from the commodified
totality of systemic variables, predominates. A review of Georg Lukács’ (1978) inquiry
into “the ontology of social being,” in particular labor as a model of social practice,
might be useful in neutralizing any wrong-headed prejudice against historical
Foreword xv
materialism. As both Henri Lefebvre (in Dialectical Materialism, 1968) and Alfred
Sohn-Rethel (in Intellectual and Manual Labor, 1978) have shown, the foregrounding
of labor (its alienation/commodification in capitalist society, and the attendant class
conflicts) in historical materialist inquiry is a methodological postulate that is able to
resolve the split of theory and practice, agency and thought, intrinsic in the everyday
life of bourgeois society. On the other hand, as Paulo Freire suggests, the dialectical
understanding of culture exemplified by Gramsci and Amilcar Cabral cannot be fully
appreciated detached from its “role in the liberation of the oppressed” (1996: 116).
Practice and theory are ultimately indissociable. In accomplishing the task of syn-
thesizing a historical-materialist approach with socialist pedagogy, Grant Banfield’s
essay on “Marxism, Critical Realism and Class” will prove extremely helpful. Banfield
demonstrates how Roy Bhaskar’s clarification of the dialectical method can help
negotiate the perilous antinomies and conundrums in the philosophy of education
ever since Plato’s Meno asked whether virtue can be taught, and what ties knowledge
(as justified true belief) with teaching/learning (Senchuk 1995). Dewey’s holistic,
organic view of education as the growth of experience was once invoked as a maxim
of progressive teaching/learning theory. But today, as the texts by Ravi Kumar, Enver
Motala, Salim Vally, Mike Cole, Alpesh Maisuria and Robert Faivre show, the learn-
ing/teaching experience cannot pretend to be innocent of state policies administering
the learning methods, curriculum, environment, and other factors, in the service of
corporate profits under the aegis of global capitalist hegemony. Both learning and
teaching, as constituents of a “rational life … in which the critical quest for reasons is
a dominant and integrating motive” (Scheffler 1965: 107) cannot be divorced from
the political economy of a specific historical stage of class-conflicted society. A revo-
lutionary pedagogy cannot be constituted purely in the realm of ideas; it evolves, in
dialectical fashion, as the theoretical rendering of the complex multifaceted praxis/
movement of the working masses, specifically the class-conscious proletariat, as the
authentic agent of epochal historical change.
It is fashionable for radicals and progressives today to appeal to Freire, Che
Guevara, or Gramsci adapted for ad hoc intersectionality politics. But the twin temp-
tation of rationalism and empiricism, either all mind or all circumstance, persists in
waylaying any consistent anti-capitalist program. Even the resort to Gramsci evinces
the pressure of punctual contingencies in leading many followers to stress either the
phase of coercion or the moment of consent in the unfolding dynamic process of
hegemony. A cursory look into Gramsci’s remarks on the “educational principle”
(in Prison Notebooks) will show how labor/creative praxis is a necessary axiom in any
dialectical comprehension of society and its possible transformation. Gramsci writes:
“The discovery that the relations between the social and natural orders are mediated
by work, by man’s theoretical and practical activity, creates the first elements of an
intuition of the world free from all magic and superstition. It provides a basis for
the subsequent development of an historical, dialectical conception of the world”
(1978: 52). This is also what Bertell Ollman (2003) foregrounds in the Marxist “phi-
losophy of internal relations”: subjectivity/agency, the mediation of creative thought/
praxis, cannot be separated from the need to engage in the process of theorizing the
process of totality, something which Aronowitz, Giroux, Laclau and Mouffe, and
xvi E. San Juan, Jr.
their followers anathematize as class reductionism, technocratic determinism, or
worse, Stalinist totalitarianism. Let us keep in mind Marx’s reminder: “The weapon
of criticism certainly cannot replace the criticism of weapons” (1970: 137).
The closing decades of the last century witnessed the further intensification
of the crisis of liberal education signaled by the debate on “political correctness,”
multiculturalism, canon formation, representation of the nation, and civic identity.
One college president rehearsed the conserving and adapting function of schools/
teachers, oblivious to ongoing US aggression in Iraq and previous interventions in
Central America, Asia, and elsewhere (Oakley 1992). Because of the disarray in the
oppositional public sphere in Europe and North America in the wake of the impe-
rialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many progressives have abandoned “overarching
narratives, societal critiques and clarion calls for change – of the capitalist system or
the social structure,” as registered by a New York Times survey of the academic scene.
Marxist theorist Eric Olin Wright of the University of Wisconsin is quoted in this
report: “There has been some shift away from grand frameworks to more focused
empirical questions” (Cohen 2008). We cannot recount here the dangers and pitfalls
of empiricist scholasticism which have been fully examined by Martin Shaw (1975),
Istvan Meszaros (1995), and Samir Amin (1998), among others.
In addition to a return to empiricism and other eclectic nostrums to solve the crisis,
we find among critics of the Homeland Security State a revival of reformist illusions
amid the trauma of defeat. The controversy over Bush’s neoliberal regimen of “No
Child Left Behind” (see The Nation, May 21, 2007 issue) has revealed how technocratic
policies to firm up the class system are premised on the “underlying race- and class-
based interpretation of intelligence” (Meier 2007: 21). But there is so far no sustained
call for a mass anti-capitalist insurgency among educators.
We find instead more sophisticated testimonies of conciliatory adaptation. One
example is the response of Gerald Graff (2008), president of the Modern Language
Association, to the government drive to reinforce the reactionary agenda of stand-
ardization. While professing a concern for “the free-market ideology underlying
the [Margaret Spelling report on the future of higher education]” and its “narrowly
vocational vision” (n. p.), Graff argues for a formalist and fundamentalist idea of
critical thinking straight out of the old rhetorical textbooks that have served well
the tracking and repressively segregating function of education in finance in a profit/
commodity-centered system. Graff’s espousal of “intelligent standardization” as “criti-
cal to our mission of democratic education” (n. p.) does not even allude or gesture
to any ideal of equality, what Dewey conceived of as “the production of free human
beings associated with one another on terms of equality” (quoted by Chomsky
1994). These are a few symptoms of the patent bankruptcy of current orthodoxies
on how to renew the emancipatory, not to say the virtue-inducing, vocation of a
classic liberal education. Hence the need for this unique timely volume of essays that
translates into a wide-ranging reflexive praxis the thrust of Marx’s injunction (stated
in “Theses on Feuerbach”) that it is “humans who, as products of specific conditions
and upbringing, change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator
himself” (quoted in Matthews 1980). The collective message of the writers here is the
revolutionary one of transforming educational institutions and the ever-changing
Foreword xvii
narrative of the schooling experience into sites/modes of citizens practicing freedom
cooperatively – the freedom to imagine and bring about an alternative world free
from class exploitation and imperialist domination; the freedom to struggle together
for a socialist, genuinely democratic and egalitarian society in which “the free devel-
opment of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx and Engels
1971: 112).
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Introduction
Sheila Macrine, Dave Hill and Deborah Kelsh
Class is among the most fundamental of concepts in the classical (orthodox) Marxist
tradition because it has the power to explain why capitalism must be transformed into
socialism: because under capitalism, “living labour is but a means to increase accu-
mulated labour,” the wealth of the capitalist class, instead of accumulated labor being
“a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer” (Marx and
Engels 1985: 97). Class is central to analyzing capitalism and explaining that, in order
to make socially produced wealth available for “the free development of each” (105),
the property relations of capitalism must be abolished. In short, the Marxist concept
of class has the power to analyze and explain the existing and inequitable structure(s)
of ownership and power in society and thus produce reliable knowledges capable of
guiding practices that aim to restructure society as equitable, as able to promote the
free development of all humans. Yet as Julian Markels (2005) has recently remarked,
“the concept of class as a particular labor process is not only avoided by many recent
Marxists but is now unfamiliar to many non-Marxists” (n. p.).
This book is an intervention into the erasure of the Marxist concept of class from
the scene of knowledge production in education. It demonstrates the usefulness
of the Marxist concept of class by using it to explain the determinate connection
between the bas(e)ic and inequitable relations of production and the cultural in-
equities in capitalism, and to implicate dominant knowledges and pedagogies in the
(re)production of those inequities by showing that they manufacture the subjectivi-
ties capitalism requires to maintain itself. To be clear: this book takes as its object of
analysis the dominant knowledges and pedagogies that, by shrouding and confound-
ing the Marxist concept of class, serve the interests of the capitalist class. It is an
explanation of why revolutionary knowledges of class must – from the position of the
bourgeoisie – be occluded in mainstream educational theory: in order to legitimate
the property relations constituting capitalism, which are the cause of exploitation,
domination, and oppression.
Class in capitalism, as Marx theorizes it through his critique of capital, is the binary
relation of ownership to “private property” that constitutes what Marx calls the “rela-
tions of production” (1989: 21). The bourgeoisie, who own the means of production,
live off the surplus value, the profit, extracted from the proletariat, those who do not
own the means of production and must sell their labor power for a wage in order
to live. The relation is inequitable, because the social wealth that is produced by the
2 Sheila Macrine, Dave Hill and Deborah Kelsh
non-owning class is the property of the owning class. The choices members of either
class make in the course of their daily lives – what they eat, where they live, whether
and where they seek an education – are shaped by these bas(e)ic and inequitable
production (property) relations. Class, in other words, determines social, political,
and intellectual inequity. It does so through dialectical, contradictory materialist rela-
tions between base and superstructure in which “‘[d]etermination,’” as Aijaz Ahmad
(2000) has reminded, “does not mean … the kind of entrapment of which structural-
ists and Foucauldians speak; it refers, rather, to the givenness of the circumstance
within which individuals make their choices, their lives, their histories” (6).
In the place of the Marxist concept of class, dominant knowledges have installed
what Deborah Kelsh, in Chapter 1, calls “cultureclass,” which understands class to
be an effect of culture and not the causal relations of production that determine
culture. Cultureclass displaces, at the level of knowledge, the constitutive but also
historically determined and therefore changeable “outside” of capital without which
capitalism cannot exist: the exploitation of labor power. In doing so, cultureclass cuts
the dialectical relation between production and culture in which humankind, “by …
acting on the external world and changing it, … at the same time changes [its] own
nature” (Marx 1967a: 173). Cultureclass denies that “there exists a materialistic con-
nection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode
of production” (Marx and Engels 1989: 50), and in doing so it works to naturalize
capitalism as the only and final mode of production possible, simultaneously block-
ing knowledge of capitalism as a mode of production that can be transformed into
socialism.
As chapters by Kelsh, Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh (Chapter 2), and
Robert Faivre (Chapter 8) in particular emphasize, changes in culture are effects of
class struggle over productivity, the rate of extraction of surplus value from workers.
At the level of knowledge, the displacement of the Marxist theory of class, as Ebert
and Zavarzadeh explain, is one outcome of capital’s long attack on labor that began in
the mid-1940s. Its displacement has contributed to the reshaping of the humanities
into what they call “hypohumanities,” the instrumentalization of the humanities into
a pedagogy that contributes to training humans so that their labor can be deployed
for profit. The conversion of the humanities into hypohumanities displaces “the
knowledges that teach citizen-students a critique-al grasping of everyday practices
in their historical and social relations,” blocking the understanding of subjectivity in
terms of position in the relations of production (relation to property).
In the displacement of class with cultureclass, contemporary research and theory
on class in education exemplifies in its own knowledge practices the instrumentaliza-
tion of knowledges that by occluding property relations contributes to the reduction
of humans to “instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use” (Marx and Engels
1985: 88), and thus benefits capitalism.
A priority of this book, then, is to intervene in the dominant knowledges by pro-
viding access to the Marxist concept of class from a partisan position that is interested
in “combating the real existing world” (Marx and Engels 1989: 41).
Combating the real existing world includes, but goes beyond, “exposing eco-
nomic (factory and occupational) conditions” in what Lenin (1969) called “exposure
Introduction 3
literature,” leaflets in which workers tell “the whole truth about their miserable exist-
ence, about their unbearably hard toil, and their lack of rights” (55). Such literature is
evident today in the many texts in education that investigate and narrate inequities in
education, from classroom practices to working conditions to hiring practices in aca-
deme, but that stop short of connecting those inequities to the inequities of property
relations. While exposure literature can serve as “a beginning and component part
of Social-Democratic activity” (56), it tends toward “trade-union work” in which all
that is achieved is that “the sellers of labour-power learn … to sell their ‘commod-
ity’ on better terms” (56). But what is necessary is not “better terms for the sale of
labour-power, but … abolition of the social system that compels the propertyless to
sell themselves to the rich” (57).
Combating the real existing world means laying bare the connections of the
everyday – including and especially the dominant knowledges – to the “material
surroundings” (Marx and Engels 1989: 41), the historical and material conditions that
determine them. It means tracing these connections through the mediated layers of
the social so that the root cause of inequity – the property relations of capitalism
– cannot hide behind the alibis of the dominant knowledges, such as the various
versions of cultureclass, that mask rather than explain the cause of the deepening
impoverishment of the proletariat and greater profit for the bourgeoisie.
The writers of these chapters, then, combat the real existing world by using the
Marxist concept of class not simply to expose the fundamental brutality of human
exploitation, but also and above all to contest the claims of the dominant knowledges
and explain what they evade: the causal connections between the capitalist mode
of production and contemporary inequities in culture, including issues involving
language, representation, and education.
Ravi Kumar (Chapter 3) details the ways in which the state in India, by substitut-
ing for knowledges of class the discourses of multiple cultural identities related to
caste, ethnicity, tribe, and so forth, represents itself as working for “development”
of the educational system that will benefit the “people” in all their variety. But in
fact, as Kumar shows, the state works in the interests of the rule of capital, to the
disadvantage of the proletariat as a whole, and in particular, girl children. In such a
context, he argues, what is necessary is an understanding of the state as an agent that
mediates in favor of capital, an understanding grounded in the Marxist theory of class.
It is just such an understanding, he argues, that is necessary to unify and educate all
workers so that they do not accept the discourses of the multiple cultural identities
and engage in intraclass struggles that benefit capital.
In Chapter 4, Enver Motala and Salim Vally extend the question of the state
and education to post-apartheid South Africa, specifically in relation to the con-
nections between class and “race.” They explain why social analyses of education
in post-apartheid South Africa that do not attend to the question of class not only
result in ineffective reforms, but also deny the importance of class struggle for social
transformation. While contesting social analyses that prioritize “race” to the exclusion
of class, they also argue for the significant and necessary contributions the concept of
“race” makes to developing a useful, because many-sided, understanding of capital-
ist practices of accumulation on an international scale. They urge that educational
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