Table Of Content

Capitalism-Culture and Educational Praxis A Long Revolution Andrew Gitlin Capitalism-Culture and Educational Praxis Andrew Gitlin Capitalism-Culture and Educational Praxis A Long Revolution Andrew Gitlin University of Georgia Athens, GA, USA ISBN 978-3-031-18210-5 ISBN 978-3-031-18211-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18211-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland P refAce ArchitecturAl Design Given some very helpful reviews, I want to provide a few comments that should allow you, the reader, to make informed choices concerning your movement through this book. If successful, this should make it easier for you to see and use the book’s design features to meet your needs. The first aspect of the book design I want to mention is the use of personal experiences that are put in italics to clearly demarcate the start and endpoints of my personal experience sections. To begin, I don’t want to position myself as an author conveying a set of truths or scientific objective conclusions to the reader. Rather, I see myself as a learner, constantly try- ing to see his own biases to critically look at them and modify or replace them. I do so, because unless I can see more broadly and widen my hori- zons, I am stuck in a place where my consciousness can’t consider the changes occurring on the ground. When one is blind to those changes, s/ he is less able to act, to see, and make changes on the ground. As Marx notes, the point of expanding one’s consciousness is not primarily to understand the world better but centrally to change the world. In this way, the listing of personal experiences, my activism in the world, has nothing to do with an autobiographical methodology but rather highlights the roots of my reflections, theoretical extensions, and biases. Taken together, these personal experiences are included to show my development in terms of activism and conceptual issues over time. I hope that you will want to go through a similar process and utilize this design as a template for your own process of activism and consciousness development. While these v vi PREFACE reasons may be convincing for a few, others won’t care to read these itali- cized personal experience sections. They are in italics to let you make a choice—feel free to skip them—you won’t miss a beat. A second aspect of the architectural design of this book is that it out- lines a knowledge production process in three connected parts: a critical history; conceptual extensions and praxis. This history should identify trends in your work or a field of study (or both) that you find disquieting and/or reflect only a dominant standpoint. To make this history critical requires you to expose and alter disquieting trends and expand the standpoint to include marginalized groups. This critical move to redirect these trends can lead to the identification of problems in the current theories you are using and in your own work. These problems, in turn, encourage conceptual developments, a connected second part of the knowledge production process. When this sort of development occurs, theories (your own and theories you use) can be extended. By making these extensions you move, at least slightly, from being the object of a theory to a critical subject that helps you name the theory—your version that is found to be desirable. Finally, if the object of the knowledge production process is change (never mind a long revolution), it is essential to include a praxis that moves back and forth between theory and practice such that practice changes theory as theory changes the path of practice. Understanding and acting on the contextual possibilities and constraints (including the material conditions of production) is a key factor in a Marxist view of praxis. This view of knowledge production and praxis can make sustainable changes over time or even transformations in society. With this design in mind, you can utilize or, better yet, extend this knowledge production process—to make it your own. A third and final aspect of this book’s architectural design involves addressing and challenging the inherent problems of looking at a group such as educational critical theorists (ECTs). All groups have differences within them. If you don’t emphasize these “within differences,” you are not providing a complete picture of the group. On the other hand, if you only emphasize the internal differences, the commonality of the group starts to become more opaque. To minimize this problem (it is very diffi- cult to eliminate it), whenever I use ECT it refers to EC-Theorists (ECTs) in the United States only. As will be pointed out later, for exam- ple, the Educational Critical Theorists (ECTs) dramatically differ when the United States is compared to the UK. Furthermore, critical theory has become used by many diverse groups of theorists including PREFACE vii post-modernists and critical race theorists such that critical theory has lit- tle or no inherent consistent meaning. For this reason, critical theory is capitalized, Critical Theory, not to suggest its importance but rather to indicate that I am talking about a specific take on critical theory—Critical Theory emerging from ECTs. It may be helpful to emphasize I am talking about a particular group and a particular theory that allows you to make your own decisions on how to utilize Critical Theory, make conceptual extensions, and engage in praxis within an ECT framework to better understand oppression and act on it to change the world. Athens, GA, USA Andrew Gitlin c ontents 1 Becoming Academic: The Construction of Political Bias 1 2 A Critical History of ECT: From Marxism to Culturalism 9 3 Finding Capitalist-Cultural Connections: Marx & Others 39 4 Oneness of Capitalism-Culture Within ECT 73 5 Marxist Praxis 107 6 Extending Marxist Praxis Within ECT 117 7 That Can’t Be Done Here or Can It? 157 8 Postscript: Completing the Circle 193 Canuimagine 197 References 199 Index 211 ix CHAPTER 1 Becoming Academic: The Construction of Political Bias Abstract This chapter, based on Marx, suggests that a first step in the humanization of the world is to see what is currently opaque and once seen, to act on those limits in a way that opens up one’s horizon to create sustainable humanizing change that boldly moves beyond the status quo. When successful, this form of praxis (linking theory and activism) creates new possibilities as well as a more complete understanding of how essences (materialist structures) and appearances (social/cultural) reflect a oneness that shapes everyday experiences. To facilitate this process, this chapter articulates what is, and the importance of, both a critical history of your field of study that is centered within a social/materialist history and a critical personal history that places the self within a social/materialist context over time. Both of these critical histories focus on significant limits in both the field and self. Importantly, because this book tries to illustrate rather than dictate ways to move forward, it provides exemplars of how these histories might be constructed but in the end this is your choice. Seeing BiaSeS George Floyd’s brutal lynching by police sparked worldwide activist protests (Dave, 6/2020) along with a great deal of personal anguish. Why wasn’t I involved in these protests? Why did my work as a critical theorist © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1 Switzerland AG 2023 A. Gitlin, Capitalism-Culture and Educational Praxis, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18211-2_1 2 A. GITLIN rarely focus on race? And centrally, why didn’t Educational Critical Theory (ECT), especially coming out of the United States,1 play a part in guiding, directing, or even shaping these global protests? As I do with many such questions, I began by rereading ECT texts and foundational books that had shaped my love for critical theory, including the writings of Karl Marx that addressed related educational issues (Wetherly, 2005; Wright, 1978; Marx, 1976, 1977, 1978a; Braverman, 1974). Importantly, I specifically reread some of the critical thinkers on culture and race (Crenshaw et al., 1996; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1993; Anzaldua, 1987; Omi & Winant, 1986). Early in this initial process, I realized that doing a history of ECT was essential to get answers to my initial questions as well as to those that emerged from my reading. It also became obvious that any history of critical theory needed to not only look out at the work of others but also look in at my own work. The inclusion of my work, however, should not be taken as a sign that I played a central part in the ECT community; I did not. Moreover, it is important to remember as Marx (1978b) suggests that Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. (p. 10) The existing underlying circumstances, however, can only be challenged if actors, in collaboration with others, transform themselves as the social (e.g., cultural) and economic conditions of existence (Marx in Allman, 2007) are changed as well. This focus on self-transformation suggests that writing a history of critical theory needs to pay attention to the role of education in promoting or hindering self-transformation or even self- development as well as a critique of social and economic pre-existing conditions (i.e., the past up to present). My critical personal history is in part my educational development that runs side by side with the broader history of ECT on the pre-existing social and economic conditions of existence that sets the boundaries and possibilities of this unfolding history. With that said, I will try to keep my personal history as brief as possi- ble and provide it as an interlude to the central story of the ECT history. This history not only touches on the initial personal questions posed above but concentrates on two central observations stemming from my 1 Hereafter, ECT will be used for all references to a specific form of Educational Critical Theory specifically in the United States, that explains why ECT is capitalized.