Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory

Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory

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Dave Hill teaches at University College Northampton. Prior to that he taught in schools and colleges in inner city London. For twenty years he was a political and labor union leader. He advised the Labour Party on teacher education from a radical Left perspective. Redprint for Education , and Rethinking Education and Democracy: A Socialist Perspective Her current research interests are in critical theory and methodology from a Marxist perspective, in relation to both art history and feminism.

She is the author of several articles on the relationship between feminism and postmodernism, on feminist art history and on contemporary art practice. Jane has been politically active since the late s in socialist and feminist politics. Peter McLaren is author and editor of over thirty books on the sociology of education, critical theory, and critical pedagogy.

His most recent books include: McLaren's books have been translated into twelve languages. He lectures worldwide on the politics of liberation. McLaren is currently working on an introductory book on Karl Marx with Rudolfo Torres and Lou Miron and a book on globalization and imperialism with Ramin Farahmandpur. He previously worked with the young unemployed and young offenders on projects in south London, which included being Director of Wandsworth Youth Development and Education Officer for the Inner London Probation Service.

His most recent publications include his edited collection with Ana Dinerstein Global Humanisation: Prior to that, Glenn taught in schools and in further education colleges. Glenn's subsequent research included studies on working students, college finance, vocational education and training, youth labor markets and Education Action Zones. In , he undertook a major study of the U. He co-wrote Red Chalk: His most recent publication is The Battle for Seattle: Its Significance for Education He has edited a four-volume anthology entitled Women and Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century and has published articles on aspects of early Victorian culture in Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry and Women: He is currently at work on a study of Chartist poetry, due to be published by Ashgate in Mike is one of the founders of the Radical Tradition network, which is dedicated to the study of the literature of labor.

He publishes widely in academic and professional journals.

Capabilities

Geoff's main areas of research and scholarship are in the sociology of the school curriculum, education policy, teacher education and health education. He has directed ESRC-funded research projects on the impact of education policies and is frequently engaged by local education authorities to evaluate policies at local level.

This point has been made, inter alia, by a number of writers Callinicos ; Crook ; Ainley ; Hewitt ; Maynard ; McLaren a, b; Aronowitz and Giroux in their pre-postmodern phase;, and Jarvis Contrary to Lyotard and Foucault, we suggest that the motor of the class struggle is still determinant and that the Enlightenment metanarratives of Marxism and neo-Marxism, and their analysis of capital and power, best explain current and ongoing economic, political, social, educational, cultural and labour market developments, both in Britain and world-wide.

We argue that these recent major processes of restructuring social, welfare and educational provision, along with trade union legislation, are underpinned by market-led strategies, and are in line with the current requirements of capitalist states Hill ; , b, Apple and Whitty Economically, at state levels, these changes entail privatisation programmes, incorporating the creation of a hierarchy of provision in the 'public' services.

Such a hierarchy has been intensified in the education system with respect to England and Wales Ainley ; Gerwitz, Ball and Bowe ; Hill a; Whitty, Power and Halpin , and in the similar 'marketisation' and hierarchicalisation of schooling in Australia Blackmore and New Zealand Lauder et al.

In particular postmodernism, albeit unwittingly for 'resistance postmodernists', serves to disempower the oppressed, by denying the notion of 'emancipation in a general sense'. This is either denied, ignored or underplayed in the discourse of postmodernism, or else the changes are designated as 'postmodern', as reflecting or being part of postmodernity Cole and Hill Adherents of Postmodernism in Britain argue that the apparent 'disappearance' of class resulted from cultural changes occurring as a result of the transition from 'Fordist' to 'post-Fordist' methods of production.

Champions of this position point to the destruction variously of 'traditional' class signifiers in Britain the decline of flat caps and whippets , class institutions such as Trades Unions, the Co-op, the Workers Educational Association , class locations such as the mining village, the steel town, factory area , and therefore of class consciousness evidenced by four successive Conservative electoral victories in Britain between and and by 'New' Labour's 'classless' appeal in its general election victory. The social and cultural order organised around class has been replaced, they assert, by a 'new order' based on individual rights, mobility, choice consumer and life-style in particular , and freedom Sanders, Hill and Hankin Postmodern academics at one level, and a range of politicians and political theorists at another, have attempted to consign Marxist analysis and socialist egalitarian educational and political programmes to the dustbin of history.

We believe, however, that a Marxist analysis and understanding of social class is crucially significant for an understanding of contemporary capitalism, and to grasp the restructuring of education that has occurred through the nineteen-eighties and nineties in many of the advanced capitalist industrial states. We argue that an understanding of social class is essential for developing and constructing economic, political and education systems based on social justice and egalitarianism.

In rejecting the determining effects of capital, or in neutralising capitalism itself, postmodernism serves to uphold the current capitalist project. The 'New Times' 6 argument is that the world has changed, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and that the advanced capitalist countries are 'increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation' Hall and Jacques It rejects an analysis based on class derived from Marx as 'old fashioned' and 'out of date', 'no longer applicable'.

It also rests on a national picture, for while in some industrialised countries such as Britain the size and weight of the traditional industrial working class has changed, with the decline of older industries such as steel, coal, heavy engineering, ship building, and a parallel growth of service industries, the working class, world-wide, is bigger than ever.

We accept wholeheartedly the position of A. Sivanandan who has summed up what 'New Times' means for him:. Use value has ceded to exchange value, need to choice, community to identity, anti-imperialism to international humanism. And the self that new timers make so much play about [has] become a small, selfish inward-looking self that finds pride in life-style, exuberance in consumption and commitment in pleasure - and then elevates them all into a politics of this and that, positioning itself this way and that way with every position a politics and every politics a position into a 'miscellany of movements and organisations' stretching from hobbies and pleasure to services Sivanandan Arguing against too much stress on consumption, Michael Rustin has suggested, correctly in our view, that the Marxist tradition has been right all along in its emphasis on creative work paid or unpaid as the central form of human fulfilment and on the importance of the work group, neither of which can be replaced by consumption This is certainly true in our own experience, and we expect also true in the experiences of the 'New Times' writers, who, we suspect derived much satisfaction from their own creative endeavours.

The New Times 'work in progress' continued through the early s. In , Hall posed the question of whether we are entering a 'new constellation of political, economic, social and cultural life' and the 'New Times' that we confront. Hall, Held and McLennan It is ironic that in a one-off issue of Marxism Today Hall, one of the major midwives of 'New Times', and of 'New Labour' as a Party fit to represent and lead Britain on the journey into the 'New Times' of postmodernity, is now returning to a more class-based analysis redolent of his early work such as Policing the Crisis Here, in , the teacher is lamenting how well his nostrums and prescriptions and lessons were learned Cole and Hill a.

While it is important to recognise that some post-Fordist developments in the organisation of production and consumption have taken and are taking place, the changes, while developmental, are geographically and sectorally limited and specific.

Such changes have not and are not fundamentally altering workers' relations to the means of production and post-Fordist developments, where they exist, should be conflated neither with post-capitalism nor postmodernism. Postmodernist analysis, with its stress on segmentation, differentiation, collective disempowerment and its telos of individuated desire, serves well the purpose of justifying and adumbrating marketised projects of capital.

Cole and Hill a, b.

New Times was a hall of mirrors, reflecting the moving picture show of the social and cultural upheavals of our time. Everything was in flux, making life uncertain, destroying old realities, creating new ones that were equally ephemeral. Our argument against 'New Times' and following Marx, is that capitalism can only be adequately theorised if 'the economic' and social class are centrally placed. Poststructuralist accounts of fragmented, de-centred subjectivity are intellectually dominant. This might be an advance on former monolithic 'vulgar Marxist' accounts of social class influenced by the Stalinist tradition, which substantially ignored questions of ethnicity, sex and sexuality in both theoretical terms and in terms of political action and mobilisation.

However much non-Stalinist theory and practice have always recognised the complexity of subjectivity.

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In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations' Tucker Thus we would argue that the concept of decentred subjectivity possesses useful explanatory power when we come to confront the question of declining 'class consciousness' 8. But we challenge arguments and theories proclaiming 'the death of class', and those proclaiming that there is a qualitative equality, a sameness, between oppression and exploitation based on 'race', gender, and social class.

Our contention is that class exploitation is fundamental to capitalist economy, as opposed to the admittedly near universal sex or 'race' exploitation. We see social class exploitation as fundamental to the continuation of capitalism. Capitalism can survive with various degrees of sex and 'race' equality. However, it cannot concede total liberation to the oppressed - women, black people, lesbians and gay men, the disabled - first of all because it relies on the divisions within the working class to maintain its rule 9 , and secondly because the achievement of women's liberation, for example, is dependent on socialist principles, including a replacement for the bourgeois nuclear family, the central site of women's oppression.

This does not mean we ignore democratic demands for increased equality now, within bourgeois society, but it does mean that true liberation of the oppressed like the liberation of the working class cannot be achieved within capitalism. That is why it is in the interests of the oppressed to link up with the working class as well as demanding the working class adopt the liberation of the oppressed amongst its demands!

In the s the feminist slogan 'the personal is political' was developed to demand the politicisation of personal life, especially sexual relations. But in the s and s it was used to shift the centre of gravity of struggle from the community and society to the individual. As Bourne says, '"What has to be done? Kobena Mercer asserts, 'Identity is a key motif of post-consensus politics because the post-war vocabulary of Left and Right and centre It represents an experience of change, transformation and hybridity' Rutherford, A number of commentators have taken up the theme.

For example, in Race, Culture and Difference , a postmodern anthology, edited by James Donald and Ali Rattansi, for example, it is argued that '[g]etting to grips with the dynamics of "race", racism and anti-racism in Britain today means studying an ever changing nexus of representation, discourse and power. And that requires a critical return to the concept culture. According to Rattansi, the new thinkers have re-posed the question 'in terms of cultural authority and individual agency' to require a 'careful analysis of contemporary political struggles over questions of representation, symbolic boundary formation and identification' Rattansi , cited in Bourne Rattansi wants us to discard yet more.

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For they belong to that era of creating 'convincing, all-encompassing explanatory frameworks'. Today, in postmodern times, there is a 'loss of confidence in the West's metanarratives'. On the contrary, racism is connected to the sub-conscious and the irrational. Besides, how can we use the concepts of a modernity which has been associated with colonialism, genocide, slavery and the Holocaust?

If Enlightenment-derived values of human universalism installed 'western man' as the norm, how can we use these same tainted values to mobilise for human rights 'against racialized discrimination, inequalities and violence? Whether such concepts as these are helpful in understanding the experience of black people at the hands of the police in Britain and the United States seems to us more than questionable. The enquiry into the handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder in Britain, the beating of a black Haitian and the gunning down of a West African immigrant by New York police have exposed both the London and New York police departments as institutionally racist.

That this can be put down to 'a consideration of the relation between the "psychic" and the "social"' seems unhelpful, even laughable. Many of today's academics, influenced by post-structuralism and postmodernism, would contest this concept of institutional racism, preferring 'racialized discourse' as the key concept of study Secondly, they would view the idea of engaging in a political fight against racism out of date.

Thirdly, they would object to the term 'anti-racism' and indeed the anti-racist project, calling instead for the acceptance of 'difference' Bourne As Bourne notes, the whole thinking about race has been turned upside down, depoliticised. Every aspect of left theory on race has been overturned: Eschewing collective political struggle opened the gates to a whole supermarket of different quasi-political brands of fashionable thinking on what used to be called racism. Prominent among the ideas being sold is that power itself is no longer to be conceptualised in terms of 'the state' or 'the ruling class' but as something that operates everywhere, 'horizontally as much as vertically, internally as well as externally' Brunt It can therefore be taken on at a 'multiplicity of points of resistance' which include creating new discourses ibid.

Thus, for Brunt, politics is not something done 'out there' in meetings and parties but here in the person Bourne The recent formation of a National Civil Rights Movement in Britain March , based on the American example and supported by many family campaigns against police injustice to blacks, Asians, Irish and asylum seekers, suggests that the oppressed themselves do still think it is necessary to organise, demonstrate and fight in traditional ways to overcome racism and discrimination.

Central to postmodern theories is the idea that it is no longer possible to talk in terms of truth and knowledge. Instead postmodernists adopt a position that 'truth' is only ever a momentary reading in a chain of meanings. This lack of confidence in the possibility of stating a set of values, seeking knowledge and knowing truth from falsity is evident in another essay in the journal, 'Say you want a revolution Criticising McLaren for seeking 'the execution of a programme' in his attempt to enumerate a list of 'what must be done' Biesta This implies that such a challenge cannot be put in the name of some superior knowledge or privileged vision, not even, as Gur-Ze'ev correctly concludes, the knowledge or vision of the marginalised or oppressed.

It can only proceed Such ignorance is neither naivete nor skepticism. It just is an ignorance that does not claim to know how the future will be or will have to be. It is an ignorance that does not show the way, but only issues an invitation to set out on the journey. It is an ignorance that does not say what to think of it, but only asks, "What do you think about it? It is, therefore, an emancipatory ignorance Biesta We are reminded of the slogan - 'Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Knowledge does not have to be unthinkingly accepted, for it is crucial to develop a critical approach to ideas, so that each one may be tested against experience for its validity, but this process is surely one conceived of as Praxis by Marx and Marxists Furthermore, if we refute the idea that we can learn from history, we are left defenceless in the face of capital's advance.

For example, from the experience of the war in Bosnia we can make an informed guess that the current 'war' by NATO forces against Milosevic in Serbia has more to do with the restoration of capitalism in the old Warsaw Pact countries than it has to do with the humanitarian aim of 'saving' the Kosovan Albanians Foucault is again influential in Biesta's article, especially on the latter's assertions on power and discourse, power and knowledge. His understanding that all knowledge is intimately bound up with power is disabling indeed:.

This is not to say that change is no longer possible or that knowledge has become futile. It rather signifies the end of the "innocence" of knowledge as a critical instrument, and thus the end of the possibility of demystification. If knowledge is always imbued with power, and therefore cannot be used against it, what of the working class woman who discovers she can speak in public and passes on a few tips to a friend who would like to do the same, as happened in the Women Against Pit Closures movement in the mid s in Britain 13?

Such learning is all but ruled out by Foucault and his disciples. Postmodernism refutes the idea of any common interest between oppressed groups and classes especially of any commonality between the oppressed and the working class and instead points to how different experiences colour and determine understandings - disallowing any action in common, say between women and the working class, the working class itself, or a fraction of it, black people and women, etc.

They argue that Enlightenment thought, including Marxism, is gender and colour blind,. It is all very well for an academic with a good job and income to reflect on the nuances of difference between women and the very real differences between women and men - but is it in itself, an answer? No of course it is not. Nor is it a credible reading of what Marx and Engels actually wrote. Rather, it is based on a crude and economistic reworking of Marxism which has little to do with what Marx and Engels actually advocated.

Neither ever made the relationship between the economic base and the superstructure an inevitable one:. According to the materialist conception of history the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction of life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. We make our own history, but in the first place under very definite presuppositions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are finally decisive. But the political, etc.

Nor was their work and the writings of Marxists who followed them on the relationship between the working class and the oppressed a mechanical one. For example Trotsky believed that socialism could not be achieved without the liberation of women from unpaid domestic labour. He wrote in , 'In order to change the conditions of life, we must learn to see them through women's eyes', Trotsky How man enslaved woman, how the exploiter subjected them both, how the toilers have attempted at the price of blood to free themselves from slavery and have only exchanged one chain for another - history tells us much about this.

In essence, it tells us nothing else.

But how in reality to free the child, the woman, and the human being? For that we have as yet no reliable models. All past historical experience, wholly negative, demands of the toilers at least and first of all an implacable distrust of all privileged and uncontrolled guardians Trotsky Far from being 'gender-blind' Marxism has a long history of interest in, theories about and practical attempts at overcoming the oppression of women. Nor is it possible today to understand the position of women without the help of theories which can explain women's role in the workplace and in the family - and the relationship between the two.

Marxism can help us with this, but it is a help which those engaged in debates about identity ignore. This does not mean that the relations between the working class and the oppressed do not need to be thought through. In that decade, when campaigning activities gave theory a critical edge it has since lost, the terms of the debate were of apparent 'hierarchies' of oppression. Is the oppression of women more important that that of lesbians and gay men? Is the oppression of heterosexuality more central than racial oppression?

Socialist feminists always argued that this was not a useful way to pose the problem nor to win the campaign: For the central issue was to try and win. It was recognised that one section of the social movements could never win on its own, and nor did the social movements have the social weight to win without the support of working class. The working class is anyhow made up not just of white men, but of all the oppressed groups too, women, black people, lesbians and gays, the disabled, etc. The question was always how to win as many as possible to any particular demand - say reproductive rights - by showing how such rights affected both women and men.

Thus socialist feminists in Britain tried to build alliances between women and the working class through the organisations of the labour movement. Even at Greenham Common, in England, where radical feminists, camped out to oppose American bases with Cruise missiles with the slogan 'Take the Toys from the Boys', were in a majority, women from Labour Party and Trade Union organisations and most famously, women from the Women Against Pit Closures movement, visiting the camp in the mid s, linked the two struggles together.

It is perhaps easier to find such examples in Britain than in the USA, because from the late s to the mid s the class struggle in Britain was at a higher level and the social movements were visible and active. These links between the working class in struggle and the social movements in solidarity culminated with the Great Miners' Strike of , and it was seen in practice what could happen when these elements were brought together.

Assertions by theorists of difference such as Judith Butler that the struggles of the oppressed lesbians and gay men can 'threaten the workability of capital' are clearly mistaken Butler But this need not lead us to ignore such struggles. For it is not that the regulation of sex is not necessary for capitalism, it is, but none of the social movements on its own can threaten the viability of capitalism. What is most reactionary about postmodern thought is its acceptance that 'nothing can be done' or that what can be done cannot be foreseen.

This pessimism characterises many of the responses to McLaren in the journal. For Biesta, for example,. My aim is not to articulate a new program or a new direction for critical pedagogy. I only want to suggest a particular point of view - which focuses on the importance of the recognition of the impossibility of critical education which is not what is not possible but what cannot be foreseen and calculated as a possibility but literally takes us by surprise Biesta But what does it mean to be committed to something like justice the term both McLaren and Gur-Ze'ev seem comfortable with?

I want to suggest - and here I will rely on Jacques Derrida, one of those "postmodernists" whom neither McLaren nor Gur-Ze'ev seems to think offers work with any ethical and political significance - that in the very name of justice, there can be a commitment to the impossibility of justice Biesta Explaining, after Derrida, that 'justice is not a principle or a criterion Like 'undecidability', justice has 'no course of action which necessarily follows', Biesta Without having any belief in the possibility of change for the better postmodernism is indeed left in one of Lather's 'stuck places'.

While it should be clear that our theoretical and political sympathies lie squarely with McLaren and we thoroughly applaud his return to Marxist theory and his cogent analyses of postmodernism, we have some reservations about his analysis of capitalism today. In his Education Theory article he paints a grim picture indeed of capitalism's 'death agony': Although he notes near the beginning of his article that capitalism is 'self-destructing as a result of intensified competition leading to overcapacity and overproduction and a fall in manufacturing profitability' McLaren Instead he goes on to list the appalling effects of the crisis on ordinary people, including those in the semi-colonial world.

These effects are all absolutely true, and it is refreshing to hear them said out loud, as he does vibrantly and repeatedly in his writings here and elsewhere, but we would alter the balance of his essay by emphasising more than he does the real difficulties global capital is in. McLaren's is an over-pessimistic analysis which does not make a realistic estimate of the balance of forces between capital and labour by which we take to mean the world working class and the oppressed , instead assuming the total hegemony of the ruling class presumably worldwide.

A few economic facts reveal some of the structural problems capitalism faces. Japan has been in recession since the beginning of the s. None of these packages has worked. Last year saw 1, companies a month going bankrupt, with unemployment at record levels The Economist , March - April 2 , p The existing Japanese crisis was made worse by the collapse of the 'Tiger' economies last year, and is now a crisis not only of the financial sector, but also of overproduction.

There are too many goods chasing too few markets. In Japan the crisis and fear of its implications, including unemployment, has led people to increase savings at the expense of spending. Thus Japan's trade surplus with the rest of the world increased by Meanwhile as of May the US and British stock markets are overpriced, based on an optimism about the long term growth of information technology along with a wave of merger activity. But the internal economy of the US is the most heavily indebted in the world, with few people with any savings and with a spending boom based largely on inflated stock markets.

All these factors make a financial crash a real possibility in the near future. As well as underestimating the crisis of overproduction facing world capital, McLaren's text seems to accept that new markets for capital's possible expansion have opened up after the collapse of the Stalinist states in But the peoples of these new markets are so poor they cannot afford the goods being overproduced in capital's heartlands; and the so-called 'Tiger' economies of SE Asia, as well as China, are more concerned to sell their goods to the rest of the world than to become its markets - hence the collapse in the price of semi-conductors, with factories such as Seimens in North West England closing down even before they have started production.

Marxism against postmodernism in educational theory.

The implicit assumption that the capitalist law of value reigns globally is a secondary problem in the framework of McLaren's essay: Although politicians and the media would have us think that capitalism, as an economic system, is in control globally, it seems to us that it is at least still open to debate as to whether capitalism has been restored in the ex-USSR and Eastern Europe, China, etc. Here is not the place to debate such issues, but although capital has made big inroads into some of the economies of Eastern Europe, especially the Czech Republic and Hungary, it is less clear that the working class in states such as Rumania and parts of the ex-USSR, are subject to the law of value Our understanding of Marxist theory should make us stop and think again about the restoration of capitalism in the former Eastern bloc countries.

To suggest that capitalism has been restored, that one mode of production a worker's state has been overthrown and replaced by another capitalist mode, without the violent overthrow of one state form for another, goes against Marxist theory. For example Marx added a point in the 'Preface' to the Communist Manifesto in stating, 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purpose.

If this is true for a transition from capitalism to a worker's state, it presumably holds good for a transition from a degenerated worker's state 16 to a capitalist mode of production. And yet in these states of the former Eastern bloc, the state has not been overthrown violently or otherwise, and while it is true that a market exists and there is some capitalist development, whether the working class is now forced to sell its labour, as a commodity, subject to the law of value, is still open to question.

These two sets of points suggest that capitalism is in much worse shape than might seem to be the case from a first reading of McLaren's article. However he does provide some stunning statistics on the effects of capitalism in crisis, including in England where the flexible workforce is now a reality for a majority of workers. Later, he quotes from an article by Bill Bigelow giving the lie to the idea that it is fine to pay workers in developing countries less because their cost of living is lower: While he does provide some useful material on the impact of capital's barbaric activities, he overestimates the possible role that a 'critical pedagogy' could play.

The very question he asks reveals this:. Can a renewed and revivified critical pedagogy grounded in an historical materialist approach to educational reform serve as a point of departure for a politics of resistance and counterhegemonic struggle in the twenty-first century? Could a 'critical pedagogy' play such a role? We are not here arguing that it is irrelevant what educators do.

Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory - Google Книги

Far from it, the class struggle is played out in everyone's everyday lives, be we teachers, steel workers or nurses. It is also played out in the lives of school and college students, as evidenced in the very substantial contemporary and recent Marxist analysis of Education summarised in Livingstone ; Rikowski ; Cole, Hill and Rikowski Where critical and Marxist educators do disagree is over the role and over the efficacy of critical pedagogy.

This concept is highly problematic. How is real social change to be accomplished? When it comes to it, McLaren's ten points are grounded, as they must be, in classroom practice - albeit of a radical and challenging kind- so that his question as to whether critical pedagogy is a point of departure for 'a politics of resistance and counter-hegemonic struggles' McLaren Whether or not it is a point of departure, we, with McLaren, consider that, along with material realisation and circumstance, such a politics is a necessary part of this counter-hegemonic struggle.

To conclude with some brief observations on the theoretical position adopted by McLaren's critics in Education Theory Fall , 48, 4 , Lather's project of 'disciplining the featured essays Failed it might be, but 'stammering and stuttering' even used metaphorically, in the face of the clear-headed offensives of capital, will get us nowhere. Simply charging Marxist theory as macho, a 'master discourse', 'too strong, too erect, too stiff' Lather Kohli, though more muted in her criticism of McLaren and Gur-Ze'ev , '[they] offered me insight and inspiration, even as I differed with them' Kohli Despite acknowledging that class analysis remains relevant, that 'economic conditions are crucial to any critical analysis of a post-industrial world' Kohli Biesta too, in his use of terms such as 'emancipatory ignorance', 'the impossibility of justice', 'the impossibility of demystification' Biesta His final sentence, 'That will be the real revolution' Biesta Postmodern calls to refute notions of truth and adopt a praxis of undecidability seems at best irresponsible in the face of capital's barbarity, at worst they do indeed appear to 'accommodate to the requirements of capital' McLaren Rather than seeking answers to compelling questions of a viable future for millions of ordinary people caught in capitalism's vicious grip, postmodernists celebrate uncertainty, confusion and lack of knowledge.

Our aim in this paper is not to engage in the largely North American debate on critical pedagogy, but rather to intervene in the wider educational debate between postmodernism and Marxism. We have put forward our views on critical transformative education elsewhere e. Originally 'exiled' from Canadian academia for his Marxist views, McLaren himself embraced postmodernism for a period in the s and early s e.

McLaren only to return to an historical materialist position in the later s e.

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