2.1-2 Suoranta & McLaren

Throughout history there have been numerous forms and practices of socialism, and socialist pedagogies, often tightly confused with each other in the public debate. As much as we look forward to the day that capitalism will be described as part of the prehistory of socialist society, we readily acknowledge that the progenitors of socialism made their longest and most striking strides across the stage of world history during the Enlightenment (see Wilson, 2003). (1) Most modern forms of socialism consist of comprehensive, yet secular and often conflicting visions and worldviews with distinct views of society, human beings, education, and other earthly matters. But if there was one common idea in the vast array of different formulations of socialism, and their corresponding pedagogies, it had to do with the emphasis on social and the collective as well as the collaborative and equal character of societies and human beings.

Socialism throughout the 20th century has been largely seen as a casualty of Cold War politics. Western democracies and their vaunted political histories have often ignored or denigrated socialism as a desirable or even distinctive ideology, praxis, and philosophy. Particularly in North America, socialism and its pedagogical principles have often been viewed as ultimate threats to capitalist democracies, if not frequently demonized as a half-living, half-dead monstrosity still stalking humankind and the new world order. Part of this has to do with the failure of the political left in the United States, where establishment propaganda and political untruths have tended to become “part of the left’s own intellectual apparatus” (Herman, 1997). But it is also because socialism has often been conflated with despotic regimes and totalitarian police states -- Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the current regime of North Korea being three frequently cited examples. These regimes may have used the word socialism to depict their experiments but they bear little resemblance to the socialism of Marx. They also do not reflect the central tenets of other thinkers that we have come to associate with the socialist tradition who maintained that the principles of representative democracy are an integral and necessary part of popular rule, and should not be jettisoned in political upheavals, or even during the transitional phase of dictatorship of the proletariat.

Socialism and socialist pedagogy (as well as Marxism) has had several conceptual and historical uses both in social theory, and in various political practices (see Burawoy & Wright, 2000). Sometimes - as in the above-mentioned cases - it has been propagated as a comprehensive worldview often in the rigid forms of dogmatic enunciations. Other times socialism and socialist pedagogy has been dismissed as senseless and antiquated utopianism, with little relevance to social theory or praxis. Besides these uses socialism has been treated as a worthy political philosophy containing ideas, insights and arguments for social scientific analysis as well as for developing diverse social practices. In these contexts socialism has been defined not as a doctrine, a body of readymade truths, or an ideology, but as an unfinished endeavor, and an open “what if” category in need of reconstruction. In this sense the aim for truly critical social and educational theorist has always been to build arguments for socialist theory and pedagogy by seeing their promises but also by understanding their limitations. Our own attempts to develop a radical humanistic socialism takes the position that socialism and pedagogical socialist principles are not a dead letters, but open pages in the book of social and economic justice yet to be written and rewritten by people struggling to build a truly egalitarian social order outside of capitalism’s law of value.

Socialist Pedagogy’s Global Reach

Historically the greatest trial in adapting and developing socialist pedagogy was the Soviet Union, a Communist republic founded by Lenin’s Bolsheviks during the October Revolution in 1917, and ended by President Mikhail Gorbachev 74 years later. Socialist educational principles were designed to form a Homo Sovieticus, a critical term invented by Aleksandr Zinovjev, a severe critic of the Soviet system that, according to him, contributed to making its citizens lazy, jealous, crooked, indifferent, unreliable, and opportunistic.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917 the Communist Party’s Central Committee reformed the Russian educational system by socialist principles. Soviet educator Anton Makarenko (1888-1939) brought Soviet educational thinking in international scene. Socialist pedagogy attracted number of visitors around the world, especially from developing countries but also from the western world; among the early visitors was John Dewey who visited the Soviet Union in the summer 1928. In the book Impression of Soviet Russia Dewey reported his experiences, and was particularly impressed by some aspects of the Soviet “collectivistic mentality,” and the collusion of school and state. In the Soviet period, education was centralized like it is at present in many European countries, especially in Scandinavian Social Democracies. The teaching of Marxist-Leninist doctrine was an important element of the Soviet school curricula. The underlying philosophy was built around a socialist ethics that stressed the primacy of the collective over the interests of the individual.

Socialist pedagogy has been employed in various other countries in different continents. Perhaps the best-known example in Africa is Tanzania under Julius Nyerere’s (1922-1999) Presidency. Nyerere was known in his country as ‘Mwalimu,’ a teacher with a socialist vision of education. In the Arusha Declaration of 1967 he stated as follows:

The objective of socialism in the United Republic of Tanzania is to build a society in which all members have equal rights and equal opportunities; in which all can live in peace with their neighbours without suffering or imposing injustice, being exploited, or exploiting; and in which all have a gradually increasing basic level of material welfare before any individual lives in luxury. (Nyerere, 1968.)

In Latin American countries there has been several experimentations in socialist pedagogy over the past century. In Cuba, Fidel Castro established universal public services after the socialist revolution. In 1960, only a year after the revolution, the Cuban leader decided to abolish illiteracy by recruiting 120,000 volunteers to teach illiterate peasant of all ages to read in the remote rural areas. Most of the teachers were high school students equipped only with books and gas lanterns. Public education, with over 98 percent literacy rate, is among the most impressive successes of the socialist revolution, especially given the 40-year-long US embargo against Cuba.
Before that in the 1930’s Mexico, the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), the precursor of the current Partido Revolucionario Institucional, promoted attempts to develop public education that was socialist in character. Mexican progressives and revolutionaries were inspired by the ideas of Soviet educational theorists. Mexican socialist pedagogy stressed collective learning, and organization for adults and children, and the learning of productive habits through collective gardens and co-operatives. During the period of socialist education, a new curriculum for national history was implemented in order to emphasize the primary role of workers and peasants in the revolution. Schoolteachers and other educators were involved in socialist pedagogy, and became key movers in people’s political mobilization (Vaughan, 1997).

In Nicaragua the Sandinistas applied socialist pedagogy in their efforts to establish their society after the decades of US-funded terror. In 1979 the Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew the brutal Somoza dictatorship (supported by the US). The Sandinistas established a stable, pluralistic society in which the death penalty was abolished, hundreds of thousands of poor families were given titles to the land, and schools were built. As noted by Harold Pinter (2005): “A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated. The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set.”

Paulo Freire’s prominent influence both in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere should also be mentioned. In his letters, Freire (1978) noted how most African countries were simply adapting, at independence, the old colonial governmental and educational systems and mind sets (which were still in place). During the 1970’s he visited several African countries like Guinea-Bissau, and Sao Tomé and Principe where he worked “as a militant educator who tried not to separate his task from the liberation cause of the oppressed” (Gadotti, 1994, 47). He exchanged his pedagogical ideas also with President Julius Nyerere, and in his teaching remembered to refer to the Tanzanian experience, and their courage to refuse to accept prefabricated educational solutions, and to fight against educational imperialism (see also McCullum, 2005). In Latin America Freire’s inheritance has been - if possible - even more important than in other parts of the world; not only in Brazil but also in many other countries in the continent.

One of the latest examples of radical socialist initiatives in education (based on the writings of Simon Rodriguez, the teacher of Simon Bolivar, and other radical educators such as Freire) on a national scale can be found in Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. President Hugo Chávez’s educational reform is based on the themes of “coexisting, knowing, and doing.” He has called upon fellow Venezuelans to reject the “imperialistic anti-values” of previous governments, and to “rescue the authentic Christian values, lost by the capitalist model.” Chávez has also asserted that education is a “vital aspect” of the Bolivarian political program and his government is committed to improving the quality of the educational system and transforming its traditional project through the construction of ‘Simoncitos’ (preschools) as well as other Bolivarian educational institutions—from schools and high schools to universities and technical schools. In his weekly public speeches Chávez has blamed the capitalist media campaigns for filling the people with poisonous lies by teaching them to overvalue money and leading them to believe that the poor are a useless social waste. Chávez has stressed such values as unity, brotherhood and solidarity above competition and individualism (Wagner, 2005).

Aims of Socialist Education

While there is much talk about labor today, and the decline of the labor movement, what is important for educators to keep in mind is the social form that labor takes. In capitalist societies, that social form is human capital (Rikowski, 2005). Schools are charged with educating a certain form of human capital, with socially producing labor power, and in doing so enhancing specific attributes of labor power that serve the interests of capital. In other words, schools educate the labor-power needs of capital—for capital in general, for the national capital, for fractions of capital (manufacturing, finance, services, etc.), for sectors of capital (particular industries, etc.), or for individual capital (specific companies and enterprises, etc.), and they also educate for functions of capital that cut across these categories of capitals (Rikowski, 2005). General education, for instance, is intentionally divorced from labor-power attributes required to work within individual capitals and is aimed at educating for capital-in-general. Practical education tries to shape labor-power attributes in the direction of skills needed within specific fractions or sectors of capital. Training, on the other hand, involves educating for labor-power attributes that will best serve specific or individual capitals (Rikowski, 2005).

It is important to note that Rikowski has described capital not only as the subsumption of concrete, living labor by abstract alienated labor but also as a mode of being, as a unified social force that flows through our subjectivities, our bodies, our meaning-making capacities. Schools educate labor-power by serving as a medium for its constitution or its social production in the service of capital. But schools are more than this, they do more than nourish labor-power because all of capitalist society accomplishes that; in addition to producing capital-in-general, schools additionally condition labor-power in the varying interests of the marketplace. But because labor-power is a living commodity, and a highly contradictory one at that, it can be re-educated and shaped in the interests of building socialism, that is, in creating opportunities for the self-emancipation of the working-class.

Labor-power, as the capacity or potential to labor, does not have to serve its current master—capital. It serves the master only when it engages in the act of laboring for a wage. Because individuals can refuse to labor in the interests of capital accumulation, labor-power can therefore serve another cause—the cause of socialism. Socialist pedagogy can be used as a means of finding ways of transcending the contradictory aspects of labor-power creation and creating different spaces where a de-reification, de-commodification, and decolonization of subjectivity can occur. Socialist pedagogy is an agonistic arena where the development of a discerning political subjectivity can be fashioned (recognizing that there will always be socially-and-self-imposed constraints).

From the angle of revolutionary critical pedagogy (a term coined by Paula Allman) socialist pedagogy is multifaceted in that it brings a Marxist humanist and socialist perspective to a wide range of policy and curriculum issues. The list of topics includes the globalization of capitalism, the marketization of education, neo-liberalism and school reform, imperialism and capitalist schooling, and so on.

Revolutionary classrooms are prefigurative of socialism in the sense that they are connected to just social relations in the outside world. Classrooms based on socialist principles try to mirror in organization what students and teachers would collectively like to see in the world outside of schools—respect for everyone’s ideas, tolerance of differences, a commitment to creativity and social and educational justice, the importance of working collectively, a willingness and desire to work hard for the betterment of humanity, and a commitment to anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic practices.

The core principles for a socialist pedagogy were set out by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto in 1848: “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.” Marx did not write much about education as such, but since his time numerous authors in curriculum and policy-making have, over the years, appropriated from Marxist theory in advancing a critical pedagogy and socialist praxis.

The core idea of socialist pedagogy is its emphasis on the unity of human beings, and we are referring here to unity in the positive sense of ‘unity in diversity’ as solidarity between people, or as a common good, and the equality of human beings irrespective of their class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or disabilities. An incipient socialist pedagogy can be seen in the seven learning tasks described by Stephen Brookfield in his book, The Power of Critical Theory (although Brookfield does not use the term “socialist” but “critical” to describe his pedagogy). The first task, that of challenging ideology, is to set people free from the servitude of the repressive ideas. But as Brookfield reminds us, ideologies are hard to catch since they are tightly “embedded in language, social habits, and cultural forms that combine to shape the way we think about the world. Ideologies appear as common sense, as givens, rather than as beliefs that are deliberately skewed to support the interests of a powerful minority” (2005, 41). Secondly, a socialist pedagogy helps students to contest aspects of hegemony that affirms political control in the hands of the rich and powerful. Here Brookfield is using hegemony in the sense of “the way people learnt to accept as natural and in their own best interest an unjust social order” (ibid. 43). As he aptly points out, “the dark irony, the cruelty of hegemony, is that adults take pride in learning and acting on the beliefs and assumptions that work to enslave them. In learning diligently to live by these assumptions, people become their own jailers.” (Ibid. 44.)

Thirdly, a socialist pedagogy is directed at unmasking power. This is accomplished by facilitating people to read the word and the world analytically and critically, and encouraging them to acknowledge and act on the power that they already possess. “Adults learning the possibilities of their own power through sharing knowledge, experiences, tactics, strategies, successes, and failures” (Brookfield, 2005, 48) forms an important dimension of what we are called a socialist pedagogy. A socialist pedagogy helps students overcome alienation and creates the context for the struggle for human freedom, which can only exist in a nonalienated world. As Brookfield, notes, “alienation is antithetical to freedom, and the abolition of the former is essential to the realization of the latter” (ibid. 50). Alienation does not describe only capitalist conditions but all the other forms of social life reducing human beings to commodities in the economical or infrastructure of capitalist society.

Fifthly, a socialist pedagogy is learning about liberation. Although socialist pedagogy emphasizes collective action, it reserves in its pedagogical agenda a place for reflective distancing. It thus sees momentarily reflective privacy not as retreat from collective solidarity but a true revolutionary act, a deepening step into the real world. (Ibid. 51.)

The sixth task for socialist pedagogy has to do with reclaiming reason (ibid. 56). An important element of reasoning is to direct it towards a good cause, to criticize inhuman circumstances, and to construct a better world. Reasoning concerns all spheres of life, and can take various forms. In socialist pedagogy it can refer to basic literacy (reading, writing, math) and to economic, health, and media literacy.

And finally, one of the central tasks of a social pedagogy is practicing democracy as part of the overall process of furthering political and economic transformation. Whatever the final purpose, socialist pedagogy is always political in a strict and concrete sense of the term: “it is intended to help people learn how to replace the exchange economy of capitalism with truly democratic socialism” (Brookfield, 2005, 351).
Socialist pedagogy aims at educating human beings as capable of thinking collectively, co-operatively, and in solidarity with their fellow human beings and often adopts an eco-socialist perspective with respect to the biosphere or nature. Socialist education fosters critical and analytical skills to comprehend the world, to read the world, and to act within and upon the world in ways that build the conditions necessary for a socialist society. In the context of socialist pedagogy critical thinking does not refer to isolated cognitive faculties, or new business liturgies found in management textbooks, but to social reality, in that its focus is on “common interests, rejecting the privatized, competitive ethic of capitalism, and preventing the emergence of inherited privilege” (Brookfield, 2005, 351). Critical thinking can thus lead to the radical statements like the following by John Briggs (2005), a retired  steel-worker, and WWII veteran: “Us capitalists, the wealthiest in the world, are at the same time the most  savage, brutal, callous bastards since the Nazi regime, actual inheritors of  their ideology and racism. Only a conscious working class can end the rationale that greed is good, that war is necessary evil. (...) There is no solution without a revolution by the workers of the world.”
A more elaborated evaluation on working class’s possibilities to change the world is given by Yates (2004) who states that organized labor needs to meet more consciously its racist bias, conservative, even anti-left past (at least in the US), and global challenges. The working class needs to educate itself; not only by creating more opportunities for labor education, but also for diverse literacy in economy, media, environment, health, cultural and aesthetics. This will eventually further to a working class and human way of looking at the world and ability to right measures to various socio-political matters. Furthermore workers self-education raises class-consciousness, and overall interest in being-in-the-world, a sense of a leftist and just culture. (2)
Furthermore, the working class needs to co-operate in building “more labor-intensive, smaller-scale, more localized, and energy-conserving production” (ibid.). Other essential tasks for the workers of the world consist of “universal health insurance, meaningful job training, generous leave programs, universal education, and reduced working hours” (ibid.). In addition international solidarity and co-operation are high on the list of urgent tasks as well as environmental issues, for socialist pedagogy aims at balance between human beings, and human beings and nature.
Among the most essential and debatable questions in socialist pedagogy are the following:

- What is the role of economy in developing socialist societies and education?
In the debate some have advocated centralized state control of the economy, that is, the state’s ownership of the means of production, others have emphasized workers' councils and co-operatives controlling their own economic means as in some experiments in Latin America. Yet some have stressed balanced and politically (and globally) regulated market economy as in current social democracies in Europe where none of the governments lean towards a total state ownership of the means of production.

- What is the role of education, and who educates whom?
A famous answer to the latter question is given by Paulo Freire who emphasized critical dialogue – as he puts it “loving, humble, and full of faith” – between student-teachers and teacher-students. In his problem-posing education as a humanist and liberating praxis he maintained that the oppressed and dominated people must fight for their emancipation (Freire, 2005, 86) by educating themselves and their educators who can be victims of their own alienated upbringing and consumerist-driven instrumental education. Students of higher education have also approached the former question by maintaining the possibilities of lifelong learning in the societies of post-scarcity, largely in the spirit of young Marx: “For the first time in human history everyone may be able to pursue their own educational ends at any age and for the goal of individual development. When we have freed ourselves from work without end, education isn’t required to be only vocational. In the post-work world intellectual and aesthetic interests of students are primary.” (Aronowitz et al., 1998, 78-79.) In other words, socialist pedagogy – against some populist claims about the socialist homo economicus – stresses that people do not live on bread alone. Forms of art become forms of life both in the curriculum of socialist pedagogy, and in the quotidian existence of the population.
Socialist pedagogy assumes after Marx and Engels (1848) that “the free development of each is the condition for free development of all.” This ruling principle of socialist pedagogy and emancipation of all the people is based on the idea that the capitalistic mode of production has long reached its peak: human beings have become alienated, and transformed into things. Socialization of the means of production is the condition of human freedom, and for the meaningful life at work and elsewhere. (See Fromm, 1990, 254-255.) Socialist pedagogy combines hand and heart, and educates fully developed human beings who possess not only vocational and intellectual skills but also such human qualities, among others, as utilitarianism, solidarity, co-operation, mercy, faith, love, and hopefulness along with a sense of beauty, and respect of others regardless of their race, gender, religion, or age.
Although plethora of conservative commentators and authors have claimed that socialism is dead, especially given the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, many socialist ideals live inside capitalist schooling and educational practices at the moment. Take for example such teaching and study practices as collaborative learning, study circles, forms of pedagogical constructivism, or action research. Many educational researchers, also mainstreamists, have maintained the virtues of sharing, co-operation, and helping others to learn, and that all students – children and adult alike – should get help, guidance and support according to their needs, and contribute according to their individual abilities (see Bruner, 1996). From the point of the view of socialist pedagogy it is not at all necessary “to make a few individuals into the ‘best’ and treat the rest as an undifferentiated mass” (Sennett & Cobb, 1972, 261).
Radical socialist pedagogy restores the original meaning of ‘not yet’, as the sign of the open horizon of the future. It is not a wish in the wind or perpetual optimism but educated hope based on the logic of practice: the practice of educators, factory workers, cleaners, and social workers etc.
What is needed more than ever today are pedagogies that connect the language of students’ everyday experiences to the larger struggle for autonomy and social justice (3). And it is imperative that such pedagogies, as they are put into the service of building socialist communities of the future, do so in the spirit of pursuing genuine democracy and freedom outside of capital’s law of value.
Many of today’s socialist educators pursue locally rooted, self-reliant economies, designed to protect society from the corporate globalists. They work to decolonize cultural and political spaces and places of livelihood, to fight for antitrust legislation for the media, to replace indirect social labor (labor mediated by capital) with direct social labor, to live in balance with nature, and replace the dominant culture of materialism with values integrated into a life economy.
Socialist educators develop a vision of the future that transcends the present but is still rooted in it, one that exists in the plane of immanence, and not in some sphere of mystical transcendence. It attempts to “speak the unspeakable” while remaining organically connected to the familiar and the mundane. Socialist educators acknowledge the presence of the possible in the contradictions that human beings live out daily in the messy realm of capital. They seek a concrete utopia where the subjunctive world of the ‘ought to be’ can be wrought within the imperfect, partial, defective and finite world of the ‘what is’ by the dialectical act of absolute negation. Terry Eagleton makes a similar point when he writes:
We cannot legislate for the future, not least because it is not ours, but the people’s to create. Dreams of the future, as the Frankfurt School reminded us, too often confiscate the very political energies that are necessary for their very realization. Yet there is still something to be said for trying to speak the unspeakable. For the fact is that any authentic future must be to some extent in line with the present as well as discontinuous with it. If it is not—if the future is not somehow inherent in the material forces of the present—then it is just wishful thinking, a vacuous, purely gestural kind of politics. An authentic future must be feasible as well as desirable. Otherwise we will persuade men and women to desire uselessly, and so, like the neurotic, to fall ill of longing. In fact, we could claim that utopia is inherent in the present in at least this sense: that without some dim notion of justice, freedom and equality, we would have no standard by which to judge the present, and so would be incapable of identifying its defects The future is already potentially present in the shape of the blind spots and contradictions of the present—in its silences and exclusions, its conflicts and fragmentations. (Eagleton, 2005, 21-22.)
Socialist educators work toward a transformation of the social through a form of concrete as opposed to metaphysical transcendence, through entering into the subjunctive mode of “what-could-be. ” Because they refuse to venture beyond the given their quest for the transformation of the present into a new social order is not utopian but concrete-utopian.
Not only must socialist educators understand the needs and capacities of human beings—with the goal of satisfying the former and fully developing the latter—but they need to express them in ways that will encourage new cultural formations, institutional structures and social relations of production that can best help meet those needs and nurture those capacities to the fullest through democratic participation. Equally important is realizing through their self-activity and subjective self-awareness and formation that socialism is a collective enterprise that recognizes humankind’s global interdependence, that respects diversity while at the same time builds unity and solidarity. Socialist educators strive to bring about changes in the economic, social and cultural order not by emptying out subjectivity but by making possible the full development of human capacities for the benefit of all (Gulli, 2005). Labor must cease to be exploitative and compulsory and become “productive at the level of a fundamental and general social ontology” (Gulli, 2005, p. 179). Thus, labor must cease to become a means to an end (as a means for the augmentation of value) and move beyond the realm of socially necessary labor to become, in Marx’s terms, “the prime necessity of life” (cited in Hudis, 2005a).
Revolutionary critical pedagogy is a socialist pedagogy but one that does not seek a predetermined form or blueprint of socialist society. Neither does it endorse the idea of the spontaneous self-organization of the multitude. It’s praxiological reaching out is similar to what Michael Steinberg refers to as a “negative politics”:
A negative politics…is grounded in the fact that our mutual self-constitution continues regardless of the ways in which we construe our experience. It opposes certainties and assurances of knowledge, but not in the name of either a different certainty or of a human characteristic that is presumed to lie beneath the social. It has hopes, not of a world that it already knows how to think about, but one that will not claim to be the culmination of time and that will not hold to ideas, ideals, or even values that seek to arrest the endless transformation of our lives together. It looks not to the perfection of detached knowledge but to an expanding attentiveness to embodied understanding. It is a path not to the future but to a deeper experience of the present. (Steinberg, 2005, 180.)
Socialist educators seek to move beyond the struggle for a redistribution of value because such a position ignores the social form of value and assumes a priori, the vampire-like inevitability of the market. Value needs to be transcended, not redistributed, since a socialist society cannot be built upon the principle of selling one’s labor for a wage. Nor will it suffice to substitute collective capital for private capital. As Hudis (2004a) argues, we are in a struggle to negate the value form of mediation, not produce it in different degrees, scales or registers.

Conclusion

Socialist pedagogy defined as revolutionary critical pedagogy works within a socialist imaginary, that is, it operates from an understanding that the basis of education is political and that spaces need to be created where students can imagine a different world outside of capitalism’s law of value (i.e., social form of labor), where alternatives to capitalism and capitalist institutions can be discussed and debated, and where dialogue can occur about why so many revolutions in past history turned into regimes of terror. It looks to create a world where social labor is no longer an indirect part of the total social labor but a direct part it (Hudis, 2005, 2005a), where a new mode of distribution can prevail not based on socially necessary labor time but on actual labor time, where alienated human relations are subsumed by authentically transparent ones, where freely associated individuals can successfully work towards a permanent revolution, where the division between mental and manual labor can be abolished, where patriarchal relations and other privileging hierarchies of oppression and exploitation can be ended, where we can truly exercise the principle ‘from each according to his or her ability and to each according to his or her need’, where we can traverse the terrain of universal rights unburdened by necessity, moving sensuously and fluidly within that ontological space where subjectivity is exercised as a form of capacity-building and creative self-activity within and as a part of the social totality: a space where labor is no longer exploited and becomes a striving that will benefit all human beings, where labor refuses to be instrumentalized and commodified and ceases to be a compulsory activity, and where the full development of human capacity is encouraged.

Notes

(1) Some of these modern forms of socialism include but are not limited to African socialism, Christian socialism, Communism, Democratic socialism, Guild socialism, Humanist socialism, Islamic socialism, Libertarian socialism, Social democracy, Syndicalism, Utopian socialism, and their diverse variations in such orientations as Angka, Castroism, Juche, Leninism, Maoism, Situationism, Stalinism, and Trotskyism.

(2) Working class education has regained interest both in “new working-class studies,” and radical adult education (Russo & Linkon, 2005; Nesbit, 2005). A multi-disciplinary field of new working-class studies finds its foundations and inspiration from the early twentieth century worker education, Myles Horton’s and Don West’s popular education and in their fight for economico-social justice in the Highlander School, and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. In radical adult education the very same approaches and figures have long been part of the field’s theory and practice, but often in rather domesticated forms. The prolonged aversion of social class has nowadays diminished in adult education discourse, and the concept of class gained new momentum.

(3) An expanded version of some of the ideas presented from here on can be found in Peter McLaren, Fire and Dust, International Journal of Progressive Education, vol 1., no. 3., 2005. http://inased.org/mclaren.htm

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Socialist Pedagogy
It’s Not What the Ideologues Taught You
Juha Suoranta & Peter McLaren
University of Tampere & UCLA