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Scenes From the Classroom Struggle
By SCOTT McLEMEE
London
"If this event were serving the interests of the ruling class," says a participant in the Marxism and Education conference at the University of London, "we'd have coffee, and maybe something to eat."
Everyone laughs, which is one way to forget about how uncomfortable the chairs are getting. Karl Marx joked to Friedrich Engels that he would make the bourgeoisie pay for the hemorrhoids he developed while writing Das Kapital at the British Museum, a few blocks from here. After several hours of listening to papers on revolutionary educational theory, I am beginning to appreciate that sentiment.
While one of the speakers puts a long quotation from Marx on the overhead projector, I look around the room to do a head count. Roughly 80 people have registered for the daylong conference, the full title of which is "Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues III -- Pedagogy and Culture." Perhaps 60 attendees are in the room at any given time. A few have come from France, Germany, Italy, Malta, and the United States. A majority are British. And most, of whatever nationality, are professors or graduate students from schools of education, with a few schoolteachers mixed in. The fellow who complained about the lack of coffee is a health-care worker taking the day off to attend. He sells a Marxist journal that encourages wage-slaves to grapple with Hegelian dialectics.
A flier by one of the conference's organizers, Glenn Rikowski, a lecturer in education at University College Northampton, places the day's proceedings in a socioeconomic context. Capitalists are looking to the public sector as a place to invest "as other areas of profitmaking look increasingly risky (e.g. the dot.com bust)," he writes. "Education will be run primarily for the benefit of shareholders and corporate 'image.' In the process, education itself will be devalued and narrowed for business interests."
In April 2000, Mr. Rikowski and three other scholars met to discuss how Marxist theory could respond to the growing corporate pressures on public education. A transcript of the meeting appeared the following year as Red Chalk: On Schooling, Capitalism, & Politics, published by a leftist think tank in London called the Institute for Education Policy Studies. It was a slender volume, rather like a certain manifesto that comes to mind, and it served as a catalyst for a meeting in September 2002 called "Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues," which Mr. Rikowski organized with Anthony Green, a lecturer in the sociology of education at the University of London.
"When we put out the call for the first 'Marxism and Education' in 2002," says Mr. Green, "we thought it would be a good turnout to draw 20 or perhaps 30 people. Instead there were a hundred people wanting to come. We had to turn most of them down." The seating space for the event was limited, and so was the amount of secretarial help available.
A second daylong gathering was held last April. The fourth conference is already scheduled for next year on May 5, Marx's birthday. "It appears that we have reached critical mass," says Mr. Green, "though we're still running things on a shoestring."
Even so, they manage to keep the events moving along quite well, thanks in part to the force of their personalities. There is a Lenin-like quality to Mr. Rikowski -- a compact and intense man who once published a critique of orthodox leftist educational theory under the title "Scorched Earth." An essay by a colleague quotes an e-mail message in which Mr. Rikowski says that he periodically asks himself, "What is the maximum damage I can do (given my biography, skills, talents, physical health, etc.) to the rule of capital?"
Mr. Green is the more affable of the two. His manner makes him an ideal master of ceremonies. Mr. Green manages something rarely seen at an academic conference: He keeps every paper strictly within the announced time limits. A distinguished Gramsci scholar, accustomed to speaking at length on the pedagogical implications of the Italian Communist leader's cultural theory, gets no more time at the podium than someone describing her work evaluating student teachers from London's poorest schools. As the Gramsci scholar complains about the time limits, I have the impression that Mr. Green bears some slight resemblance to Engels, whose correspondence with Marx reveals him to have been the embodiment of patience.
To be a radical in Britain now certainly requires a great deal of that virtue. The rise of Tony Blair and New Labor has meant the erosion of the left's role within mainstream electoral politics. Gone are the days when socialist principles were enshrined in Clause Four of the Labor Party's charter, which pledged "to secure for the workers ... common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange." In 1996, Mr. Blair proclaimed that the "totalizing ideologies of left and right no longer hold much purchase" on "the spirit of the times" -- a Clinton-like idea, expressed in terms echoing the jargon of postmodern academe. At a Labor Party conference this fall, when the traditional socialist anthem "The Red Flag" was sung
The people's flag is deepest red
It shrouded oft our martyred dead
But ere their limbs grew stiff and cold
Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold
observers noted that Mr. Blair seemed to be having trouble remembering the words.
Much of the frustration audible during the Marxism and Education conference is directed at Mr. Blair's government. Indeed, Mr. Rikowski's comments about the growing corporate influence on public education emphasize the role of New Labor in legitimizing the idea that "private-sector management methods ... are needed to 'modernize' education for the 'knowledge economy' based on information technologies."
For a handful of people attending the conference, however, all talk of privatization and globalization is, at best, a distraction. During the open discussion at the end of the day, two participants hold forth on the deep and mortal crisis now facing capitalism. It is, they say, incapable of recovery, let alone progress. The entire system is on the verge of collapse.
They speak with bracing intensity. It seems clear that they expect the world's economy to implode, and soon. Perhaps later in the week. An awkward silence fills the room, rather like what happens when a Jehovah's Witness has explained the basic scenario of the apocalypse.
Running into Mr. Green in the hallway later, I suggest that the Marxism and Education conference next spring could take place in very interesting times indeed -- what with the revolution coming in the meantime, and all. He looks exasperated, but also amused.
"Incredible." he says. "I've never believed that sort of thing. I tell people that we have to think in terms of decades. That it might not be until later in this century that the socialist movement is on track."
It is, by any standard, a long-term perspective. For the moment, I am not quite sure whether Mr. Green sounds optimistic or pessimistic. Then again, there are passages in Marx himself that are equally ambiguous. In Das Kapital, for example, he even hints that the world of dog-eat-dog capitalism might continue for a very long time -- until, finally, one gigantic corporation has control over the economy of the entire planet. (Thereby presumably making things easier for the revolutionaries: It cuts way down on the number of capitalists they have to overthrow.)
Leaving the conference, I wander around Bloomsbury -- the very streets where Marx must have stretched his legs, from time to time, after a long day of scribbling with his eye to the distant future. Across the street from the British Museum, there is a pub where, according to legend, he often stopped for a drink. Today, I notice, there is a Starbucks nearby.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Notes From Academe
Volume 50, Issue 15, Page A40
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