Derek R. Ford’s “Encountering Education:” Bridging Marxist Educational Theory and Practice

By Peter McLaren

It was almost seven years ago that I participated in Derek R. Ford’s dissertation defense at Syracuse University. In that work—later published as Education and the Production of Space—Ford built on my own revolutionary critical pedagogy by further experimenting with the exact educational logics at work in revolutionary struggles and their spatial relations and implications.[1] After many twists and turns, for the last several decades I’ve worked to enlarge the scope of critical pedagogy into social movements because Marxist pedagogy is nothing unless it’s contributing to a social universe outside of capitalist value production.[2] Ford is one of several who continue to take that project in new directions, and since his dissertation he’s continued his work as a communist organizer at the local, national, and global levels and, just as importantly, has continued to write and theorize at the intersections of Marxism, pedagogy, and revolutionary struggles today. His seventh book, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy continues this trend in important and provocative ways.[3] The book is an incisive intervention in the fields of educational and political theory, yet it’s also one that’s relevant to organizers and activists today.

Ford begins by observing the frequency with which Marx’s eleventh Theses on Feuerbach—that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”—is cited. From here he launches into his own intervention by noting that what is rarely mentioned is “the direction toward which he wanted to change it,” something that is inseparable from what he studied and the theory he articulated.[4] In other words, Marxist theory isn’t merely about changing the world but about advancing the class struggle toward the eventual abolition of class society. This is the transformation from the capitalist mode of production to the communist mode of production via socialism, which “as a social formation” is a combination “of elements of both modes of production in which communist relations and means of production are ascending through the class struggle.”[5] The novelty of Ford’s work is the way he sees pedagogical processes as absolutely central to not only the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production but, more importantly, as key yet neglected aspects of the struggle for a new mode of production. Ford contends that we have to both explain the political context of our moment and the pedagogical philosophies of marxist education appropriate to that conjuncture, while insisting that neither are reducible to the other.

An Overview of Ford’s Latest Riffs

The first chapter begins where his last book, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy, left off: with Ford’s unique and bold excavation of two latent pedagogical logics in Marx’s own works.[6] This is a theme he’s developed elsewhere in various ways, and in this sense Encountering Education is another extended riff on this theory. This is not mere repetition, but rather the result of Ford’s sprawling research that refuses to follow a linear trajectory. In this book, it serves as the foundation for the “elements of a marxist pedagogy” that Ford organizes around the “disinterpellative encounter,” a concept first proposed by another former student of mine, Tyson E. Lewis. Whereas Althusser articulated interpellation as the material process through which subjects are inaugurated into the mode of production, Lewis and Ford theorize disinterpellation as the disruption of that process. “The pedagogical encounter,” Ford writes here, “is ‘an exposure to an outside,” and an excess or surplus gap within the lesson.’”[7]

For Ford, Marx’s distinction between the method of presentation and inquiry serves as the starting points for a marxist pedagogical philosophy of learning and studying, the former of which is linear and guided by predetermined ends and the latter of which is open-ended and guided by a ceaseless wondering and wandering to and fro. Ford innovatively reads work by Marx and his commentators as gesturing toward but never reaching this pedagogical dialectic Marx articulates.

The next chapter develops a theory of “errant learning” in which both pedagogies are blocked together, and the political context here are anti-colonial and decolonial struggles. He begins with John Willinsky’s Learning to Divide the World, which looks at how education was and is fundamental to colonialism.[8] Ford attends to Willinsky’s neglect of learning and colonialism while at the same time contributing to revolutionary work on studying that has focused primarily on neoliberalism. He does this through a highly unique—and for some, probably, controversial—turn to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Space and Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres project. Here, Ford identifies “the grasping drive as the educational foundation of the colonizing apparatus. I argue that the grasping drive positions opacity as a potential that must be realized—as a thought that must be known—an orientation that ends up sacrificing opacity as such.”[9] Ford turns to the question of form through Sloterdijk, linking the grasping drive to “lordly imagining,” before drawing out the revolutionary potential of Sloterdijk’s work on foams. He develops his theory of “errant learning” as “another form of dialectically blocking together the methods of inquiry and presentation, but one that shows the necessity of presentation and the existing historical material conditions in which we engage in inquiry.”[10]

After exploring the colonial and imperial context of our times, Ford turns next to the urban coordinates of our struggle and our present. He shows how the grasping drive is the pedagogical logic of today’s urbanism, which he justifies and then develops a pedagogical response to by turning to Jean-François Lyotard’s later work. Indeed, here we will note Ford’s highly unorthodox marxism that, while it’s unapologetically committed to the proletarian class camp and the struggle for communism, looks for philosophical allies everywhere he can, even in the most unsuspecting of places. Today’s urbanism—the megalopolis—is one in which everything is put into circuits of communication and exchange and “is ‘an economy in which everything is taken, nothing received,’” and is thus illiterate. Ford takes illiteracy as a positive element for marxist pedagogy insofar as such illiteracy “is not the negation or suppression of literacy, but instead a development of literacy as grasping, through which forms and concepts constitute objects under the mind’s direction and the subject’s will.”[11] Instead of presenting what this looks like, he inquiries into examples, one of which is the use of “scare quotes.” When we write or read square quotes, we “create a margin around the words and prevent any firm links between the words inside and outside to be drawn. While we can produce uncertain connections (“what is it about ‘this’ word?”), these always slip out of our grasp.”[12]

Urbanism isn’t only about steel and pavement, bounded densities of population and production, but is also virtual and material at the same time. In the fourth chapter, he builds on Curry Malott’s work on the postdigital, which Malott sees as a struggle “over what form the postdigital will take, which will be determined,” Ford urges, “by what mode of production prevails.”[13] While there is much of interest in this chapter, what is perhaps most politically and theoretically important is Ford’s argument against marxist theorists who have abandoned Marx’s theory of value today on the basis that “immaterial” and “knowledge” or “cognitive” work and products are immeasurable. “Marx’s law of value,” he reminds us, “is precisely immeasurable” insofar as both aspects of socially-necessary labor time are “dynamic,” “unpredictable,” and at times even outside of even our individual and collective consciousness.[14] The main problem he identifies with capitalist postdigital pedagogy is “that it limits individuation to the capitalist form of individuality and reinforces our conception and experience of individuality as a finalized starting point rather than an endpoint.”[15] Capital needs the individual subject-form to produce commodities (like knowledge). Yet rather than argue for the collective alone, Ford proposes—in postdigital fashion—for the pedagogical and political process of individuation through incalculable thought.

Ford begins the conclusion by noting that “there’s an immense power that comes from hearing an explanation for one’s oppression and our collective poverty and misery,” but that “explanation is only one part of the marxist pedagogical dialectic. The other part—inquiry—is a different kind of power: the power of wonder.”[16]  Here he summarizes the political and pedagogical distinctions between inquiry and presentation beautifully:

“If one side of the marxist pedagogical dialectic is about knowing and presentation, then we have to attend to the other side, which is about thought and inquiry. Such a distinction turns on the dialectic between exchange-value and use-value, between abstraction and differentialization, between capitalism and communism. The dialectic itself is here, in the present, in the global capitalist world, but in the world in transition. Understanding or knowing involves a determinate judgment that takes place when given data comes under the mind’s order and comprehension is a faculty of determination in which data comes under the mind’s comprehension. Thinking, by contrast, is an exposure to stupor, an experience with immeasurable concepts that the mind can never grasp.”[17]

After an important presentation and study of interpellation, counterinterpellation, and disinterpellation, Ford turns to the role of noise and music in anti-colonial struggles to tie together the various riffs produced in the book, ending with the example of technologies that mediate the voice such as autotune, which show us that vocalization is a ‘process without a subject’ insofar as they prevent us from linking the sound of a voice to an essence of an individual subject or a piece of fixed capital.” These technologies produce a “sonic surplus” that we have to listen to both synchronically and diachronically as well in order to “receive an immersive education in the wonder as well as the theory of class struggle, a struggle that is advanced ideologically and materially through the forces of opposition and swerve.”[18] The swerve is the unpredictable but nonetheless intended action of the marxist pedagogue.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt in my mind that Ford’s book—and this review—will be challenging to some. Yet for those who are confused, I can only urge you to spend time with Encountering Education, which makes these dense and difficult theories accessible and makes them come to life with real-world examples. That the book is available as an affordable paperback and a free online PDF will hopefully contribute to the essential ideas in this book proliferating throughout our movements. The pedagogical elements of the book aren’t recipes or dictates, but rather resources for us to use in all of our revolutionary educational endeavors.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. In 2005, a group of scholars and activists in Northern Mexico established La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica to develop a knowledge of McLaren's work throughout Mexico and to promote projects in critical pedagogy and popular education. On September 15, 2006 the Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.

Notes

[1] Derek R. Ford, Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography, and Urban Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017).

[2] Peter McLaren, Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 373.

[3] Derek R. Ford, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy (Madison: Iskra Books, 2022).

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] Ibid., 94.

[6] Derek R. Ford, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

[7] Ford, Encountering Education, 14.

[8] John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

[9] Ford, Encountering Education, 43.

[10] Ibid., 44.

[11] Ibid., 76.

[12] Ibid., 85.

[13] Ibid., 86. See also Curry S. Malott, “Capitalism, Crisis, and Educational Struggle in the Postdigital,” Postdigital Science and Education 1, no. 2 (2019): 371-390.

[14] Ibid., 93.

[15] Ibid., 99-100.

[16] Ibid., 102.

[17] Ibid., 103.

[18] Ibid., 122.

The Decarceral Possibilities of Political Education

By John Kamaal Sunjata

We must confront the carceral structures mechanistically embedded in our methods of education. Unfortunately, school as a social formation reflects the deeper, carceral logics animating the racial capitalist state. Therefore, we must take an abolitionist approach to education that subverts its institutional patterning—the acquiescence of our collective will, the subordination of our critical faculties, and the total indoctrination of the masses for the purposes of status-quo reproduction. The current style of education (re)fabricates racial capitalist social relations and extends the racial-coloniality of white supremacy. Part of revolutionary political education then must cultivate an environment wherein educators are not mere fonts of carceral authority, but authoritative fulcrums in the invention of decarcerated learning. The student is not an object where “knowledge” is deposited, rather both the student and educator are subjects in the process of learning. Paulo Friere identified the banking model of education, the one we are most intimately familiar with, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and advocated for what he called the “problem-posing method.” Learning is the process where we gather useful data and construct information in reflective participation and reflexive equilibrium with material reality. Knowledge is the result of this dynamic feedback, a culmination of exertions where we engage our critical faculties and weigh numerous rationales against material reality; material reality itself is an active participant in the process of knowledge-creation. The individualized struggle against the obstacles of intellectualism becomes a shared, collectivized struggle when all concerned parties are partnered together in pitched, dialectical motion as its functionaries.

Education must not be an exercise in the domination of the vulnerable, but an exercise in the liberation of the oppressed. We don’t want to reproduce carceral forms, we want learning environments where freedom flourishes edenistically. The dominant convention supports racial capitalism, racial-colonialism, and white supremacism; the dominant convention is ultimately the state of ordinary and extraordinary oppressions due to the machinations of political economy. If we endeavor to overturn the dominant convention, we must design the learning environments where revolutionaries are created. For education to be a force that produces revolutionaries, we must curate intellectual creativity, curiosity, and critique. Collapsing the relationship of carceral authority that educators hold over students is crucial to creating a shared struggle, and a shared struggle is crucial for mutual respect. As such, mutual respect only springs forth once unjustified hierarchies are directly confronted and vigorously resisted. The natural advantage the educator tends to hold above the student is intellectual experience in the form of crystalized and fluid knowledge. However, despite this, there is still space for shared struggle to occur.

Shared struggle is a necessary and sufficient condition for liberation for, as Chairman Fred Hampton once said, “If [we] dare to struggle, [we] dare to win. If [we] dare not struggle, then…[we] don't deserve to win.” Shared struggle is only possible in the presence of opposition. Opposition always presents a reactionary resistance inversely related to any new sociopolitical currents. Reactionary resistance cannot be overcome without a greater revolutionary opposition or an escalation in the level of shared struggle. So, shared struggle itself is necessary for dramatic ruptures from dominant convention. Protracted relationships of mutual respect transform into relationships of true solidarity. When an educator engages in an abolitionist politic, they will develop true solidarity with their students. When the educator is in true solidarity with their students, their institutional authorities will be utilized to protect the students from the carceral logics of schooling. The educator in democratic consultation with the students will develop ethical and sensible ways to solve interpersonal conflicts without soliciting any part of the carceral state.

An epistemic dialogue is the set of relations dialectically forged between educator–students and student–educators as subjects in learning through the shared struggle within an educational environment, inherited or developed. The communities within the sphere are affected by these dynamics as the subjects engage their material realities based upon new discoveries. True solidarity directly engages everyone with the epistemic dialogue required to collectively transform our material realities. The interactions that take place within the epistemic dialogue can be regarded as epistemic discourses. When we develop our capacities to critically approach epistemic discourses, we are equipping ourselves with tactics and strategies to subvert the dominant convention that defines our current epistemic dialogue. Our capacities are bolstered by sharpening our reflective participation and reflexive equilibrium.

Reflexive equilibrium requires we balance theory against intuitive convictions; develop general principles of ideas alongside their moral judgments, and balance ethical statements with opposing or antagonistic ethical concepts against the moral conceptions undergirding the general principles motivating so-called “common sense.” We must consider the logical corollaries of every decision and anticipate the decisions that our decisions may make. In short, we think, learn, and adjust accordingly through an interactive process.

We must also hone our reflective participation, or our investigation of phenomenon from our experiments and reflecting upon generated insights. Without an abundance of active reflection, in the presence of passive participation, people will default on the side of the dominant capitalist–imperialist paradigm. Counterrevolutionary forces will (re)create what we currently have: a society of pawns. Hence, it is the responsibility of educators and students to prefigure the ecosystem conducive for producing revolutionaries.

Paulo Freire’s Centennial: Political Pedagogy for Revolutionary Organizations

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

All revolutionary processes are educational. From organizing meetings and study groups to writing protest speeches and propaganda before the revolutionary moment to creating new revolutionary educational and cultural institutions and training teachers and specialists after the seizure of power, revolution is educational through and through. Yet exactly what kind of educational operations does revolution entail, and how can we understand and practice them?

It is precisely these questions that Paulo Freire addressed in his classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

One hundred years after his birth in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire’s name is widely recognized and, relatively speaking, so too is his canonical text. Yet the book is referenced or discussed more than it is deeply engaged. This is particularly evident when Freire’s work is severed from its revolutionary Marxist orientation [1].

While it’s often taken as an abstract guide-book for how to teach, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is really a theoretical reflection on his own experiences teaching peasants how to read and write, a theory he extends to revolutionary movements, leadership, and organization. After spending 70 days in prison for “treachery” [teaching poor peasants to read and write], he was exiled from Brazil following the military junta in 1964. He eventually settled in Chile, which is where he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The book has been targeted by the right wing in the U.S. (it is currently banned from public schools in Arizona). It addresses the educational components of revolutionary movements and, as such, it is littered with references to Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and others. Specifically, the book is concerned with how the revolutionary leadership pushes the struggle forward, or how it teaches and learns from the masses in struggle.

The pedagogies of oppression and liberation

The pedagogy of the oppressed has two stages. During the first stage, “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation.” During the second stage, which is after the world of oppression has been transformed, “this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation” [2].

The first stage addresses how the oppressed view and relate to the world. It begins by acknowledging that the oppressed possess both an oppressed consciousness and an oppressor consciousness. The oppressor consciousness is the enemy that needs to be liquidated: “The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal” [3].

This is what capitalism does: it takes everything and makes it into private property, including our ability to labor. This has a profound impact on the world, even instilling the oppressor consciousness in the oppressed. Thus, we have to distinguish an oppressor consciousness from the oppressed person, and we have to transform that consciousness.

The way that we engage in that transformation is absolutely crucial, and this is where the question of pedagogy comes into play. Freire calls the traditional form of pedagogy “banking pedagogy.” In banking pedagogy, the teacher is the one who possesses knowledge and the students are empty containers in which the teacher must deposit knowledge. The more the teacher fills the receptacle, the better teacher she is. The content remains abstract to the student, disconnected from the world, and external to the student’s life. Banking pedagogy—which is what most of us in the U.S. experience—assumes that the oppressed are ignorant and naïve. Further, it treats the oppressed as objects in the same way that capitalism does.

For Freire, education must be rooted in the daily lives and experiences of students, who are subjects rather than objects. The correct educational method for revolutionaries is dialogue, which means something very specific. To truly engage in dialogue means becoming partners with the people. In this situation, “the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” [4]. This process is referred to as conscientização, or coming-to-critical-consciousness.

A decisive element to the location and direction of conscientização is the pedagogical relationship. This relates to Freire’s critique of the banking model of education and to his reconception of the teacher-student relationship. The dialogic model is a relationship between teacher and student, one which is more—but, and this is absolutely crucial, not completely—horizontal. In this schema, “people teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher [5]. The teacher does not relinquish authority or power, as if that was even possible. Instead, the teacher takes responsibility for producing new critical knowledge of reality with the student.

While the pedagogical relationship and process are important parts of Freire’s thought, they have tended to be isolated from Freire’s ideological commitments and have come to stand in for Freire’s entire work. As a graduate student in a fairly critical school of education, I was only assigned the first two chapters of the book, and I’m convinced this is common practice. These chapters are rich; they’re where he denounces banking pedagogy and formulates dialogical pedagogy in response. When we stop here, however, we don’t discover the reason why he bothered writing the book in the first place.

By selectively reading the book, Freire’s dialogic pedagogy is substituted wholesale for his broader conceptual and political work, his vocabularies and theories that generated new understandings of education and revolution. There is nothing inherent in dialogue or dialogic pedagogy that necessarily leads to progressive, critical understandings. For this to happen the content must be placed in a particular context by a teacher. Peter McLaren, one of the few U.S. educational theorists to insist on Freire’s revolutionary commitments (and a comrade of Freire’s), goes so far as to say that “political choices and ideological paths chosen by teachers are the fundamental stuff of Freirean pedagogy” [6]. We can’t divorce the methodology from the ideology, the theory from the method, or the critical from the pedagogy in Freire’s work.

The dangerous fourth chapter

Freire begins the last chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed with “Lenin’s famous statement: ‘Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,’” which Freire rewords to insist that revolutions are achieved neither by verbalism nor by activism “but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed” [7]. It would be just as wrong to claim that reflecting on and helping name oppression is enough for revolution as to claim that activism is enough for revolution. The task of revolutionaries is to engage with our class and our people in true, authentic dialogue, reflection, and action. If we have dialogue and reflection without action, then we are little more than armchair revolutionaries. On the other hand, if we have only action without dialogue and reflection, we have mere activism.

Reflection and action are not divisions of labor between revolutionary leaders and the people, whereby the leaders think and direct and the people are only able to act on their orders. “Revolutionary leaders,” he writes, “do bear the responsibility for coordination and, at times, direction—but leaders who deny praxis to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis” [8]. People and revolutionary leaders act together, building and acting in unity before, during, and after the revolution.

The prerequisite for such leadership is the rejection of the “myth of the ignorance of the people” [9]. Freire acknowledges that revolutionary leaders, “due to their revolutionary consciousness,” have “a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of empirical knowledge held by the people” [10].

The act of dialogue unites lived experience with revolutionary theory so that people understand what causes their lived experience to be as it is. This is a restatement of Lenin’s conviction that spontaneous knowledge of exploitation and oppression must be transformed through the Party into revolutionary consciousness of the relationship of our experience to the relationship of broader social, economic, and political forces at differing scales: within the factory, the city, the state, and the world.

This is a Marxist philosophy of education in that it rests on the presumption of competence. We can see it, for example, when Engels writes that he and Marx “cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes” [11]. We can also see it in What is to be Done? as Lenin argues against economist Marxists, who hold that the working class develops its own revolutionary consciousness spontaneously as a result of daily struggles with the bosses. Lenin argued that spontaneity was only consciousness “in an embryonic form,” and that something more was needed. Spontaneity is necessary but is ultimately limited to “what is ‘at the present time’” [12]. In other words, spontaneity by itself isn’t able to look beyond isolated daily struggles and forward to a new society. Lenin called the spontaneously generated mindset “trade union consciousness.”

Lenin believed that workers were capable of more than trade union consciousness. He actually derided those who insisted on appealing to the “average worker:” “You gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker,’ as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing labor politics and labor organization” (p. 153). He wrote that organizers had actually held workers “back by our silly speeches about what ‘can be understood’ by the masses of the workers” [13]. The economist organizers treated workers as objects rather than subjects. They didn’t believe in the people or their potential.

Freire actually calls on Lenin when he insists revolutionary leadership is open and trusting of the people. “As Lenin pointed out,” he writes, “the more a revolution requires theory, the more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of oppression” [14]. This isn’t a naïve acquiesce but a belief in the power of the masses to become not only agents of revolutionary movements but creators of revolutionary theory through the Party. As Lenin also observed, that the Party creates a particular group of theoreticians: In the Party “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals… must be obliterated” [15].

There is no abstract celebration of “horizontalism” within such a pedagogy. The form of the revolution and its leadership isn’t accorded abstractly; it can be more horizontal or more vertical and triangular, depending on the circumstances. Here, Freire turns to Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution to argue that their historical conditions compelled them to revolt without building widely with the people. Yet the leadership pursued this task immediately after taking power through organization, specifically the party. Tyson Lewis is one of the few to observe that “Freire himself clearly saw his pedagogy as a tool to be used within revolutionary organization to mediate the various relationships between the oppressed and the leaders of resistance” [16]. This is why Freire looked so favorably upon Amílcar Cabral [17].

Uniting politics and pedagogy for revolution

Revolutionary organizers, therefore, are defined not just by the revolutionary ideals they hold or actions they take, but by their humility, patience, and willingness to engage with all exploited and oppressed people. It is not possible for us to “implant” the conviction to fight and struggle in others. Coming-to-critical-consciousness is a delicate and contingent process that can’t be scripted in advance. Still, there are a few general components to it.

First, we have to truly get to know our people, their problems, and their aspirations. This means that we have to actually learn from people, acknowledging that, even if this is their first demonstration, or even if they voted for a democrat in the last election, they actually have something to teach us. The more experiences we learn from the people the richer our theories are and the more connection they can have to the daily realities of workers and oppressed people today. Our class is bursting with creative and intellectual powers that capitalist society doesn’t allow us to express or develop. The revolutionary party is stronger the more it cultivates these powers.

Second, we have to provide opportunities for others to understand their problems in a deeper and wider context, and to push their aspirations forward. Freire gives a concrete and relatable example of this:

“…if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand or they can overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching—but something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people’s attention… The solution lies in synthesis: the leaders must on the one hand identify with the people’s demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a real, concrete, historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive solution” [18].

Through this process, both the people and the revolutionary leadership act together and collectively name the world. Genuine knowledge is produced, and authentic action is taken, and real conviction for the struggle is strengthened.

Freire’s popularity presents an opening to draw many into the struggle and, in particular, the communist struggle. By re-establishing the link between his pedagogy and politics, we can draw those who admire his work into the movement. At the same time, we can better understand, adapt, and practice his pedagogical principles in our day-to-day organizing. “Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders,” Freire writes in the book’s last sentence, “can this [revolutionary] theory be built” [19].

References

[1] This process started with the advent of U.S. “critical pedagogy” in the early 1980s, and Freire’s later work might have played a role in it as well. See Malott, Curry S. (2015).History and education: Engaging the global class war(New York: Peter Lang), 63.
[2] Freire, Paulo. (1970/2011).Pedagogy of the oppressed(New York: Continuum), 54.
[3] Ibid., 58.
[4] Ibid., 80.
[5] Ibid.
[6] McLaren, Peter. (2015).Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education, 6thed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers), 241.
[7] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 125-126.
[8] Ibid., 126.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 134.
[11] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1991). “Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others (circular letter),” trans. P. Ross & B. Ross, inMarx and Engels collected works (vol. 45), ed. S. Gerasimenko, Y.Kalinina, and A. Vladimirova (New York: International Publishers), 408, emphasis added.
[12] Lenin, V.I. (1902/1987). “What is to be done?” inEssential works of Lenin, ed. H.M. Christman (New York: Dover Publications), 67.
[13] Ibid., 156.
[14] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 138.
[15] Lenin, “What is to be done?”, 137.
[16] Lewis, Tyson E. (2012). “Mapping the constellation of educational Marxism(s),”Educational Philosophy and Theory44, no. S1: 98-114.
[17] Malott, Curry. (2021). Amílcar Cabral: Liberator, theorist, and educator,”Liberation School, 20 January. Availablehere.
[18] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 183.
[19] Ibid.

A Marxist Argument for Stupidity: A Review of Derek R. Ford's 'Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy'

[“Kansas City Library” by calebdzahnd is licensed under CC BY 2.0]

By Bradley J. Porfilio

The most provocative books are those that don’t seek subversive theses for the sake of shock, but in order to reveal that which is most taken for granted and, in the process of questioning these underlying assumptions, reveal just how limiting they are. The most useful books for the communist tradition, in turn, are those that don’t only denounce or critique the present but actually imagine, develop, and propose alternatives as a result. Derek R. Ford’s latest book, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy accomplishes each of these tasks. What’s more, it deals with more academic theories in an accessible way, refusing the opposition between designating them as totally useless to the struggle or as the key insights we’ve been missing.

The book’s primary object of intervention is the “knowledge economy,” a term he uses reluctantly for a few reasons. One is that it’s popular parlance, but the second, and more substantive reason, is that doing so helps him identify what he calls a “troubling consensus” on the right and the left. The consensus is certainty not political, as the right and left wings differ greatly on their conception of knowledge, the conditions of its production, distribution, and consumption, and the political ends that should guide it. He doesn’t dismiss these and acknowledges that “how we understand capital’s relation to knowledge and the potential of the knowledge economy will matter a great deal in the political, social, and economic struggles ahead” (p. 57). Instead, the consensus amongst the most neoliberal and radical groupings is an unremarked pedagogy, which he calls the pedagogy of learning, realization, and grasping. In the introduction, he shows how these reinforce colonialist, ableist, and capitalist social relations.

Derek R. Ford’s Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (Palgrave, 2021)

He begins by assessing the different “takes” on the knowledge economy, accessibly and innovatively reading international policy documents from the OECD and WBI, their popular expressions in Richard Florida, as well as social democratic responses (like Andy Merrifield and Roberto Mangabeira Unger) and marxist critiques and responses, particularly those of the Italian marxist tradition (like Paolo Virno, Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, and others). This leads him into a deeper discussion of the role of the general intellect in the transition to post-Fordism and the knowledge economy.

Here, Ford not only synthesizes these transitions but, importantly, emphasizes how they were part of a struggle to define and participate in the general intellect of society—or part of the global class war. The general story concerns the limits to Fordist accumulation and the rebellions in the imperial core. But Ford highlights how “in the formerly colonized world, movements (some of which now had state power) linked the epistemological and political as they fought against imperialist economic and political domination,” (p. 45), citing Thomas Sankara’s praxis of fighting imperialist development alongside imperialist knowledge regimes as a paradigmatic example. Post-Fordism not only incorporated the demands of the imperial core but also absorbed the oppositional knowledges from the liberatory struggles of the world.

The educational consensus

He finds that the right wing pays the most explicit attention to education and the pedagogy of learning, which he links with the colonial grasping drive that positions every opacity as new potential knowledge to animate the accumulation of capital. Documenting the oppressive results of such a drive—including the perpetuation of ableism and colonialism—he shows that left projects ultimately rest upon the same pedagogical logic. He shows how contemporary marxist theorists naturalize learning and even locate it as an innate feature of “human nature,” such as in the conception of cognitive capitalism, which exploits the “desire… for learning.”

Yet whereas the right wants to control knowledge production to harness it to capital accumulation, the left wants to utilize knowledge to institute a new mode of production. “In this way,” he writes, “the left one-ups the right: ‘You want to tap into the infinite reserve of knowledge, but your small-minded thinking prevents you from understanding just how we can do that!” (p. 64). Capital is, simply, a fetter on knowledge production, one that actually inhibits the “natural” drive to learn. Thus, the Marxists end up reinforcing capital’s desire for knowledge and, as a result, the oppressive realities that follow from it. As one example, he turns to disability studies and, in particular autism. Citing Anne McGuire’s research on the flexible categories of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), he shows that the manual keeps getting more flexible and lengthier.

While the move away from the normal/abnormal binary might be progressive in some senses, it ends up reproduces the endless spiral of the knowledge economy. Ford links this with the workerist thesis of the primacy of labor over capital. Reading Mario Tronti, for example, “Even as it demystifies capital’s command and power, the workerist thesis, by privileging labor over capital, celebrates the limitless (and naturalized) productivism of labor and thus of learning” (p. 72). Ford’s book is the first to challenge the assumption that we should always be learning and that we should never stop learning. It poses the question: what if resistance and revolution demand an immersion in stupor?

An alternative pedagogy for an alternative mode of production

The most innovative and surprising proposal is to develop an alternative pedagogical logic that resists realization and the grasping drive. For Ford, this is the pedagogy of stupidity. He distinguishes stupidity from ignorance, in that ignorance can be addressed through learning whereas stupidity is intractable. He also distinguishes it from arrogance in that arrogance always has an answer, even if it’s wrong or faculty. “Stupidity, by contrast,” he writes, “never has an answer precisely because it undermines the question asked. When we’re in a state of stupor, we’re not even sure what the reference points for any discussion are” (p. 81). Ignorance and arrogance can produce knowledge for capital to enclose and expropriate, but stupidity, as he writes, is an anti-value, one that is infinitely unproductive.

Not content to remain at this level of abstraction, he provides different educational practices of stupid reading. He does so not to privilege stupidity at the expense of knowledge, but rather to introduce a necessary dialectical logic to learning. “The stupid life is a place for thought that endures without transforming into tacit or codified knowledge, or thinking the limits of thought” (p. 101). The concluding chapter presents an example of blocking these disparate yet related pedagogies together through an examination of Althusser and Negri’s marxism, which he argues are not so far apart once we consider the neglected pedagogical dimension to their different readings of Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital. In an unorthodox move, he presents this dialectic through the lens of Lyotard’s “general line,” arguing that we have to maintain a line between both pedagogies, and defend stupor from learnings attempts to annihilate it. Stefano Harney concludes his brilliant preface to the book with a quote that encapsulates the uncomfortable yet necessary argument advanced: “as Derek Ford sums it up perfectly: “there is always the noise from which knowledge emerges and to which it returns” (x).

It’s a necessary book for our moment, as organizers increasingly recognize the importance of educational processes to revolutionary transformation. In this sense, Ford’s book is a crucial offering to these movements.

Bradley Profilio, Professor and Director of the Ed.D. Leadership Program at the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San José State University, is a transformative scholar who brings insights from several intellectual disciplines, such as history, sociology, leadership studies, and social studies education, to examine the sociocultural and historical forces behind unjust educational outcomes and institutional forms of oppression. His intellectual work also unearths what policies, pedagogies, practices, and social movements hold the potential to humanize educational institutions, to eliminate educational disparities and to build an equalitarian society. As a result, his research has a broad appeal to scholars, leaders, and educators. As a leading scholar in critical pedagogy, he’s published dozens of books and articles about liberatory education. Most recently co-directed a documentary titled, We’re Still Here: Indigenous Hip Hop and Canada, which you can see here.

Calling On Action: A Review of Henry Giroux's 'Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis'

By Yanis Iqbal

Henry Giroux’s new book “Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis”, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2021, is an informed, impassioned and insightful response to the politico-economic conjuncture in which we are living. Organized into four sections, the book discusses a variety of things: the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic for neoliberalism, the phenomenon of Trumpism, the continued relevance of fascism, and the role of education in bringing about a new world. Operating with a whole network of organically interpenetrating concepts, Giroux does not content himself with isolated terms and one-sided definitions. He is always trying to integrate the totality of particular points and phases in a dynamic movement without suppressing the existential vitality of the individual elements. It is this internal characteristic of the book which makes it a worthwhile read.

Pandemic Pedagogy

Pandemic pedagogy is one of the central themes of the book. It serves as a concentrated expression of the multiple modalities through which neoliberalism has created a reactionary ideological configuration to stabilize pandemic profiteering. Giroux writes: “Pandemic pedagogy is the enemy of critical pedagogy because it is wedded to reproducing a debased civic culture while renouncing democratic social and political relations. It is a pedagogy for which power functions in the cultural sphere to depoliticize people while replacing democratic forms of solidarity with a social order invested in ultra-nationalism, social atomization, hyper-masculinity, a war culture, and an unbridled individualism”. Pandemic pedagogy emerges directly from the various ways in which the pandemic has mapped onto existing inequalities and social injuries plaguing the American society.

Unlike liberals who consider the pandemic as a “great equalizer”, Giroux says that “Its disproportionate effects on the poor and vulnerable, especially black and brown communities, pointed to the widening chasm between the rich and powerful wealthy few and the vulnerable and precarious majority. The inequities that this crisis revealed made clear how disasters unfold through relations of power, making it easier to challenge the myth that major catastrophes such as pandemics that affect everyone equally.”

According to Giroux, the necropolitical reality of neoliberalism is concealed through the deliberate individualization of social problems: “As a politics of control, neoliberalism privatizes and individualizes social problems, i.e., wash your hands, do not sit on toilet seats, and practice social distancing, as a way to contain the pandemic. In this instance, we learned how to be safe while being depoliticized, or uninformed about the role that capitalist economies play in producing a range of ideological viruses that gut the social welfare state and public health systems, if not resistance itself”. Pandemic pedagogy is present at every level of society and has morphed into a seemingly unshakeable “common sense”. An example of this “common sense” is the discourse on pandemic education which, as Giroux says, “is dominated by a technocratic rationality obsessed with methodological considerations regarding online teaching and learning.”

Afraid that deteriorating material conditions would increase the appeal of socialist politics and strengthen the class cohesion of the proletariat, pandemic pedagogy uses conservative ideological tools to discursively decompose class. Trumpism is an example of such a tool wielded by the ruling class to continue to maintain a gap between the objective structure of class and its self-conscious subjective awareness among the people belonging to that class.

Trumpism

Giroux conducts the analysis of Trumpism in two steps. First, he posits that Trumpism is integrally interlinked to neoliberal capitalism. While reflecting on the movement of the pandemic through the medium of neoliberal social relations of production, Giroux writes: “neoliberalism could not be disconnected from the spectacle of racism, ultra-nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and bigotry that dominated the national zeitgeist as a means of promoting shared fears rather than shared responsibilities. Neoliberal capitalism created through its destruction of the economy, environment, education, and public healthcare a petri dish for the virus to wreak havoc and wide-scale destruction.”

The dense feeling of alienation engendered by the intensifying capitalist crisis provides the soil on which Trumpism grows. As the distinction between consumers and citizens is increasingly blurred by the marketization of each sphere of life, people become culturally deracinated. In a situation like this, Trumpism promised to supply these alienated masses with an identitarian anchorage, a cultural fixity witch which they can associate themselves. Insofar as Trumpism aims to satiate the emotive needs of its support base, it is based on irrationalism. Giroux delineates how such irrationalism manifests itself in Trump’s everyday performative politics: “Trump’s…language exhibited a mounting compulsion and hyper-immediacy that flattened out and vulgarized any viable notion of communication…Trump employed a pandemic pedagogy in which language became unmoored from critical reason, informed debate, and the weight of scientific evidence. Instead, it was tied to pageantry, political theater, and the consolidation of power, as well as the dictates of violence.”

Situating Trump’s politics within a wider panorama of historical processes allows us to confront it not as an individual problem but rather as a symptom of a sick society. As Giroux writes, “Cruelty is not something that can be simply personalized in the figure of Donald Trump. Neoliberalism produces its own forms of institutional cruelty through its austerity measures, its decimation of the welfare state, and its support for racialized mass incarceration.” Insofar that Trump is enmeshed in the structural conditions generated by neoliberalism, his authoritarian politics can neither be eliminated through the simple transfer of executive and legislative power to a thoroughly corrupt and corporate Democratic leadership nor through an impeachment process. Commenting on the latter, Giroux says: “The impeachment process with its abundance of political theater and insipid media coverage mostly treated Trump’s crimes not as symptoms of a history of conditions that have led to the United States’ slide into the abyss of authoritarianism, but as the failings of individual character and a personal breach of constitutional law.”

To prevent people like Trump from capturing power, we need to build robust movements capable of uprooting the conditions which make people vulnerable to the propaganda of demagogic leaders. Giroux is forthright in acknowledging this: “the criminogenic response to the crisis on the part of the Trump administration should become a call to arms, if not a model on a global level, for a massive international protest movement that moves beyond the ritual of trying Trump and other authoritarian politicians for an abuse of power, however justified. Instead, such a movement should become a call to put on trial neoliberal capitalism while fighting for structural and ideological changes that will usher in a radical and socialist democracy worthy of the struggle.”

Second, Giroux frames Trumpism within the problematic of fascism. It is important to note that Giroux does not interpret fascism in the narrow way of the setting up of a police state. Instead, he perceives it as “a particular response to a range of capitalist crises that include the rise of massive inequality, a culture of fear, precarious employment, ruthless austerity policies that destroy the social contract, the rise of the carceral state, and the erosion of white privilege, among other issues.” Since fascism is invariably tied to specific social conditions, it will not be homologous to the state structures established in interwar Italy and post-WWII Germany. Giroux is spot-on here: “Fascism does not disappear because it does not surface as a mirror image of the past. Fascism is not static and the protean elements of fascism always run the risk of crystallizing into new forms…comparisons to the Nazi past withered in the false belief that historical events are fixed in time and place and can only be repeated in history books”.

Another important feature of Giroux’s conception of fascism is its dynamic nature. He writes: “Fascism is often an incoherent set of assumptions combined with anti-intellectualism, ultra-nationalism, and a demonizing rhetoric aimed at a group singled out as different and undeserving of human rights…Fascism does not operate according to an inflexible script. On the contrary, it is adaptive, and its mobilizing furors are mediated through local symbols, as it normalizes itself through a country’s customs and daily rituals”. This argument resembles Jairus Banaji’s assertion that “fascist ideology is actually only a pastiche of motifs, it is a pastiche of different ideological currents, it has very little coherence on its own.”

When the aforementioned two aspects of Giroux’s analysis of Trumpism are combined, we are presented with the concept of “neoliberal fascism” - “a new political formation…in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of authoritarian states.” Neoliberal fascism is not the apogee of an empty struggle between authoritarianism and democratic ideals. Rather, it is a “fierce battle on the part of demagogues to destroy the institutions and conditions that make critical thought and oppositional accounts of power possible.” With this statement, Giroux delves into an incisive study of the deep impacts of neoliberal fascism on agency.

Agency and Hope

Agency, defined as conscious, goal-directed activity, is heavily impacted by neoliberal fascism. Agency is the condition for every struggle and hope is a prerequisite of agency. With the arrival of neoliberal fascism, “the connections between democracy and education wither, hope becomes the enemy of agency, and agency is reduced to learning how to survive rather than working to improve the conditions that bear down on one’s life and society in general.” The overwhelming of hope by “the sheer task of survival” is elaborated in the book “Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously”, where Brad Evans and Julian Reid develop the new category of resilience to capture the broad contours of neoliberal asociality and passivity. Resilience, the authors say, is not about overcoming or resolving a crisis but about the ways and means of coming to terms with it. They argue that resilience teaches us to “live in a terrifying yet normal state of affairs that suspends us in petrified awe.”

The re-molding of agency and loss of hope is fundamentally aided by ignorance which renders us incapable of problematizing our structural conditionedness and piercing through the open-ended nature of history. According to Giroux, “Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, to undermine the value of historical consciousness, and to render invisible important issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice. Ignorance has become the organizing principle of a pandemic pedagogy that collapses fact and fantasy, truth and lies, evidence and opinion.” Ignore needs to be combated by the constant utilization of history which will make it possible to de-naturalize hierarchies and intensely engage in a movement for social justice. Whenever history is used as a terrain of struggle for hegemony, as a space for opening up to a contextualized understanding of world and as a lens to re-think and constantly evolve our own views, a new politics of memory is developed. Memory becomes an act of moral witnessing and helps to counter what Giroux calls the “bankrupt white supremacist notion of nostalgia that celebrated the most regressive moments in U.S. history.”

Need for Action

Throughout his book, Giroux refers to the imperative need for concrete action. He is not satisfied with a mere shift in consciousness or an educative endeavor aimed at empty verbosity. He is unfailingly dedicated to the construction of a movement capable of fighting against the state’s repressive and ideological apparatuses.

In an extremely important passage, Giroux writes: “I do not want to suggest…that the strength of argument can change the political balance of power exclusively through an appeal to interpretation, rationality, and the force of dialogue… Ideas gain their merit, in part, through the institutions that produce them, and as such merit the importance of recognizing that the knowledge/power/agency connection is both a battle over ideas as well as over cultural apparatuses and institutions, and the power relations that create them…Matters of critique now merge with the imperative of actions bringing together not merely critical ideas and balanced judgment, but theory and informed action.”

 A major takeaway from Giroux’s book is that the politico-strategic logic of hegemony should occupy a central position in socialist organizing. Mere academicism is totally incapable of overthrowing the bourgeois state. What is needed is the constant re-interpretation of the world in the context of struggles. Whether this re-interpretation is correct or not is decided from the practical consequences that might conceivably result from that intellectual conception. In sum, knowledge and pedagogy need to be dialectically located in the ecology of struggle where they get endlessly embodied in concrete consequences and thus, help in consolidating the dynamic of action and reflection in conversation with each other. Giroux’s book is an example of precisely that kind of knowledge-in-struggle which is singularly committed to the goal of socialism.

Marx’s Pedagogies Then and Now: Inquiry and Presentation

Pictured: The Cuban Literacy Brigades exemplify Marxist pedagogies as they play out inside and outside of classrooms.

By Derek R. Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

Ask any teacher in any setting, and they’ll tell you there’s no “formula” or “recipe” for education. Despite what corporate charter movements assert—like Teach for America’s “I do, you do, we do” rote learning—teaching is always dependent on relationships, trust, respect, and a host of other elements—and all of these can change day to day. Teaching on a Monday after a big fight broke out at a weekend party is different than teaching on a Wednesday when things have settled down a bit. Teaching in a pandemic is markedly different from teaching before one. These are just a few examples of the limitless and unpredictable forces that shape the educational experience.

As any communist organizer knows, Marxist pedagogy is not a matter of merely explaining or convincing, of coming up with the right wording, question, presentation, speech, or reading. These are educational tactics rather than pedagogies, which refer to specific ways, modes, or logics of education. Marxist pedagogy is contingent on a multitude of factors: the dominant political ideology at the time (is it intensely anti-communist or more open?), the consciousness of students as individuals or a collective (are they coming from a liberal issue-based organization or a strand of the movement?), the autonomy we’re allowed in particular settings (is it an after school club at a public/private school, community meeting, or a Party office?). And of course, there are other factors like different skills, personalities, time commitments, and relations between amongst teachers and students.

While teaching is unpredictable and contingent, for Marxist revolutionaries there’s a wealth of pedagogical content—theories that have been put into practice and whose practice has in turned informed the theories—to rely on. The previous installments of this series focused on Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and Lenin, on the use, misuse, and potential of “growth mindset,” and on the revolutionary educational theory of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. In this article, we look at Marx’s own pedagogical practice.

Prerequisite: Marxist pedagogy presumes competence

Before delving into Marx’s thoughts on pedagogy, it helps to dispel a dominant myth about Marx and Marxism: that it’s predicated on the “enlightened” revolutionary teaching the “ignorant” masses. Nowhere do Marx’s (or Engels’) texts even hint at this notion, and neither are their hints in the main documents of the Marxist tradition. For example, one of Lenin’s main gripes with the economists who focused on trade-union consciousness was that their assumption that workers could only understand their immediate situation. It was also one of Marx and Engels’ main critiques of the reformism of the Social Democratic Party in Germany. As Marx and (primarily or wholly) Engels wrote in an 1879 letter for internal circulation amongst some SDP leaders:

“As for ourselves, there is, considering all our antecedents, only one course open to us. For almost 40 years we have emphasised that the class struggle is the immediate motive force of history and, in particular, that the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the great lever of modern social revolution; hence we cannot possibly co-operate with men who seek to eliminate that class struggle from the movement. At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself…. Hence we cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes” [1].

What Marx and Engels are saying here is that we should always presume competence (a point central to the field of critical disability studies). This doesn’t mean that we should presume that the capitalist system sets everyone up for success. Quite the contrary: the system sets the masses up for poverty. What presuming competence does mean, however, is that we should assume by default that everyone we come into contact with has the capacity and potential for transforming their consciousness and ideas, habits and actions, political beliefs and commitments.

Presuming competence also puts the onus on the educator, the revolutionary, the organizer, and the organization insofar as it means that if the student isn’t “getting it” then the problem lies with us. Too often educators displace our own incompetence onto students. For example, I’ve heard many teachers speak with pride about how many Cs, Ds, and Fs they give. When approached through the Marxist assumption, however, we see that “bad grades” are not due to any innate inability but to a complex of factors, including our own teaching.

Marx’s pedagogies: Inquiry and presentation

Although Marx considered education at various points, he didn’t write about pedagogy. He does, however, make an important remark that is pedagogical in nature in the afterword to the second German edition of the first volume of Capital. Here Marx distinguishes the Forschung from the Darstellung, or the process of research from the method of presentation. He is responding to an assessment of Capital that appeared in an 1872 edition of the European Messenger based in St. Petersburg. The assessment focuses on Marx’s method of presentation and commends Marx for showing the laws of capitalism and of social transformation.

Marx claims this the review is ultimately an affirmation of his anti-Hegelian dialectic, but before clarifying his dialectic, he briefly notes the necessary differences between inquiry and articulation, or research and presentation, a difference that is not just political or philosophical, but pedagogical in nature: “Of course,” Marx writes,

“the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori [or self-evident] construction” [2].

Marx is describing two different pedagogies—or educational processes–here. The first, the method of inquiry or research, is one that examines material in all of its nuances and relationships, tracing out the different lineages, past, present, and future potential forms of development, and how they each are interdependent on others.  

Researching is a process that entails wandering around, looking for connections, thinking you’re onto something and then following it to a dead end, generating ideas, getting lost in the archives (whether they be in a library or on the internet), and so on. When researching, you have a goal in mind but the end doesn’t totally dictate everything you do. Marx researched to understand the inner logics and dynamics of capital, how these came to be, what impact they had and might have on the world, and how the contradictions can be seized during the class struggle. But this goal wasn’t always at the forefront of his mind. What we might read as “digressions” in his work are often the reality that the end goal had to be suspended at moments for research to continue. In fact, a lot of what we consider “distraction” or “procrastination” in schooling might actually be profound moments of researching.

Research, however, can’t last forever, especially for revolutionaries. At the same time, only once you’ve researched can you begin presenting your findings. Presentation takes a totally different pedagogical form. It begins with a pre-determined end in mind that guides the demonstration such that it begins with the most elementary conceptual building blocks and proceeds linearly in a developmental manner toward the end goal. Whereas researching is about means, presentation is about ends: the ends structure everything that comes before. This is why Marx, in Capital, often casts aside the historical beginnings of capitalism and leaves it to the very end, in the last part where we finally learn that it was through slavery, colonialism, legal and extralegal theft, individual and state violence, repression, and so on that capitalism came to be. But he doesn’t begin here because he doesn’t want us to 1) think this is the complete and global story of how capital came to me; 2) think it’s not going on today; and 3) because he simply wants us to understand the inner logic of capitalism and its intrinsic contradictions as it was most fully developed in England, all while giving the mainstream political-economists a fair reading.

Politics and examples of Marx’s pedagogies

While research and presentation are pedagogical ways of engaging with Marxist education, they are also political. Because presentation is guided by a pre-determined end, it tends to reinforce the world as it exists. It is only because I know what x looks like in advance that I can judge a student’s development toward knowing or becoming x. This is why research is a potentially oppositional logic: it’s impossible to grade or measure one’s progress researching. It might be that the next day after you watch some obscure YouTube video or find some odd social media page that you finally complete the research and produce something new. The problem is not with presentation per se, but rather its dominance today in capitalism. This is why Marx’s method of research is so crucial. It insists on both communist inquiry and communist presentation.

Again, even though Marx never wrote about pedagogy, his body of work provides us with potent examples of how he put them into practice. Two works in particular illuminate Marx’s pedagogies in action: the Grundrisse and volume one of Capital.

The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough draft) consists of a series of notes written in the frantic days of 1857-1858. They’re a collection of 8 notebooks published first in 1939 in the Soviet Union and made available in Europe and the U.S. during the 1960s-1970s. Never intended for publication, they’re a series of research notes, or traces of Marx’s studying, which Eric Hobsbawm says, were “written in a sort of private intel­lectual shorthand which is sometimes impenetrable, in the form of rough notes interspersed with asides which, however clear they may have been to Marx, are often ambiguous to us.” As a result, “anyone who has tried to translate the manuscript or even to study and interpret it, will know that it is sometimes quite impossible to put the meaning of some sibylline passage beyond all reason­able doubt” [3].

The Grundrisse notebooks are quite different from the first volume of Capital, Marx’s real magnum opus, the only volume published (and translated and republished) during Marx’s lifetime. The Grundrisse is almost pure research (because they were notes Marx wasn’t trying to present to others), while Capital is almost pure presentation (because it was meant to articulate the inner workings of capital to others).

For two distinct positions on these works, consider Louis Althusser and Antonio Negri. The former wrote that Capital is the only book “by which Marx has to be judged” [4]. It’s the “mature” Marx, clearly broken from his Hegelian roots (which still inflect the Grundrisse) and any mention of humanism. Althusser, however, a lifelong member of the French Communist Party, was intervening in debates over “humanism” that he saw as diluting or abandoning the class struggle. Instead of proletarians versus the bourgeoisie, the colonizers versus the colonized, it was “humans;” a non-class category bereft of an enemy against which to struggle.

On the other side, Antonio Negri reads the Grundrisse as a political text, a more Marxist text than Capital because of its “incredible openness.” Capital, according to Negri, is not only fragmentary but closed, determinate, and objective, a book where antagonisms are resolved dialectically, foreclosing the forceful rupture that communist revolution requires. Interestingly, Althusser invited Negri to give a series of lectures on the Grundrisse in Paris in 1978, which served as the basis for his book, Marx beyond Marx. Negri doesn’t dismiss Capital, of course, but insists that the book only represents one aspect of Marxism. The Grundrisse is an endless unfolding of research and antagonism. Capital, on the contrary, is more limited precisely because of its “categorical presentation” [5]. In essence, the Grundrisse is more open because it’s a series of notebooks in which Marx discovers something and presents it, which brings forth a new antagonism, which then births a new determination of content to research. They were idiomatic writings in which Marx was wandering around, discovering new elements and presenting new hypotheses.

For Althusser, it’s precisely because Marx’s presentation is so elegant, clear, and compelling that Capital represents his highest work of thought. However, he recommends different ways of reading it, primarily by leaving the first three (and most difficult) chapters for the end. What you have in Capital is a pedagogy of presentation that begins with something simple and obvious (the commodity), and then goes deeper and deeper until we see that this “trivial” appearing thing is an active crystallization of a series of ongoing struggles, like those between and within classes and the state that play out differently over history, that assume different forms (like technology and machinery), and so on. But first we have to understand the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, the role of money, and so on, before any of this makes sense.

Research and Presentation in Capital and the Grundrisse

Yet Marx’s distinction between research/presentation isn’t hard and fast; it’s not even as firmly delineated as Althusser and Negri insist. Marx sought to understand, articulate, learn, and relay the precise logics of capital, its contradictions, and how the working class has and can seize on these contradictions to institute the revolutionary transition to communism. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t complete this project because no one can fully delineate capitalism so long as it exists, as capital is by definition a dynamic social relation. This is one aspect of capital that Marx and Engels’ marveled at in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” [6].

Indeed, when one reads the various outlines that Marx presented for Capital in the Grundrisse and elsewhere, it’s clear that Marx was taking on a project he knew he could never finish. He wanted to write volumes on the state, the world market, foreign trade, wages, the history of theory, and more. Even in the first volume of Capital, we see traces of Marx’s interminable studying in the various places he notes an absolutely crucial point—one we must understand—only to move on by acknowledging he can’t address it here and it will have to wait until later: until he’s studied some more. Sometimes, like when he brings up credit and rent in volume 1, he does return to them in volume 3. But other times he never does; he never found the time for more research.

The writings of Marx, Engels, and other Marxists still explain the workings of capitalism today because they get at the fundamental dynamics and contradictions and the tasks of revolution, the ones that remain the same as long as capital exists—even if they change their form here and there, or even if they take on different weight at different moments. And even though Marx couldn’t—and never claimed to—predict how capital would develop after his death, they remain fundamental cornerstones for not only revolutionary critique and analysis, but most importantly for revolutionary action. This is because, first, Marx’s exposition did get at the core unalterable dynamics of capital and, second, because Marxism develops by returning to research and studying, to inquiry, to tracing new lineages, discovering what Marx didn’t write about because of the research available to him, the moral or social standards at the time, the (many) times he was not in good health or financial circumstances, or the transformations he couldn’t totally foresee.

Marx’s own turns between inquiry and presentation were dictated not only by his health but by the ups and downs of the market and, most significantly, by the workers’ movement. After the failure of the 1848 bourgeois-democratic revolutions, after which Marx was exiled to England, he didn’t see the prospect of another revolutionary situation on the horizon and thus began his study of political-economy in earnest. With the capitalist crisis of the mid 1850s, he was forced to speed up his research. When the Paris Commune erupted on March 18, 1871, he left his work on Capital to write about that. After the first volume of Capital was published, the other two major works he wrote before he died were The Civil War in France (1871) on the Paris Commune and the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)–which wasn’t published until after Marx’s death but that circulated widely amongst the newly-formed Social Democratic Party. Marx even pushed the publication of the second volume of Capital back because he was waiting to see how the European and U.S. economic crisis of 1873 would turn out.

Research and presentation in Capital

Both books, however, represent different ways Marx engaged these distinct pedagogical processes. Consider, for example, the chapter in Capital on the working-day, where Marx announces that “between equal rights force decides” [7]. Up until this point, Marx has taken bourgeois political theory at face value, but here the reality of the struggle forces a leap so that the struggle for a “normal” working day is just that: a struggle between two antagonistic class forces. The chapter presents a narrative of the struggle in England throughout the 19th century, one that’s filled with contradictory alliances and betrayals, advances and defeats. It’s a struggle waged not by individuals but by collectives: capitalists and workers together through the mediation of the state. Moreover, in a footnote he acknowledges the role that Protestant ideology played in the process “by changing almost all the traditional holidays into workdays” and later the role of the anti-slavery struggle in the U.S. [8]. There’s nothing predictable or deterministic about any of this; and this is what we affirm when we say that class struggle is the motor of capitalism and the motor of revolutionary transformation.

Another example of the importance of research and inquiry within the largely linear presentation of Capital is the very last chapter, chapter 33. This chapter is concerned with Wakefield’s theory of colonialism. It’s a rather dry and short chapter. What’s interesting is that it follows from Marx’s most succinct narrative of revolutionary transformation in the previous chapter on the “historical tendency of capitalist accumulation.” In this penultimate chapter, Marx turns away from the historical empirical inquiry and presents a clear and concise dialectical and historical materialist analysis of the tendency of capitalist accumulation and how the contradictions of capitalism might result in particular revolutionary paths.

Marx begins chapter 32 with the scattered private property of individuals in petty manufacture, handicraft, and peasant labor. Together, these prevent the concentration of means of production, division of labor, and cooperation of labor (social labor), the formation of the collective laborer (the antagonistic subject), and so remains locked within the production and circulation of use-values.

Halfway through this first paragraph, Marx notes that “at a certain stage of development,” these property relations create “the material agencies for its own dissolution,” producing “new passions” that “the old social organization” prevents [9]. Individual private property is annihilated by capital and, through theft, colonialism, slavery, repression, and so on, centralized and concentrated by capital. At the same time, this produces the collective laborer and a social process of work that develops a universal (although not undifferentiated) social worker. As capital concentrates the means of production and the proletarian class, the latter’s rebellious nature grows. Capital is now a fetter on production:

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated [10].

He ends the chapter with a speculation on the relative violence of both revolutionary processes. The centralization and concentration of capital was “incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult than the transformation of capitalistic private property… into socialized property” [11]. The former entailed the dispossession, theft, and exploitation of the many by the few, while the latter might entail the expropriation of the few by the many.

Rather than an empirical prophesy, however, it’s an articulation of contradictions; there’s nothing indicating a mechanical or deterministic prediction.

This is supported by the fact that, after this revolutionary clarion call to expropriate the expropriators, Marx then turns to a rather dull and uninspiring examination of Ebbon Wakefield’s theory of colonialism. Here he appreciates Wakefield’s theory for its honesty. Wakefield doesn’t try to hide the violence of colonialism or exploitation through notions of equal and free rights. He explicitly acknowledged the need for dispossession. Marx ends volume one by reminding us again that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation are based on expropriation, colonialism, genocide, and slavery. I read this as a return to research and to the antagonistic class forces that animate Marxist theory and practice. Ending with chapter 33, I think, implicitly tells us that the contradictions of capitalism—which can’t be solved within capitalism—can be pushed back and transformed through colonialism and imperialism. It’s an opening to return to studying, to inquiry.

The dialectic in chapter 32 may seem teleological and closed, but the brief exposition in chapter 33 undoes that. There are no guarantees, no objective determinants divorced from subjective differences or the class struggle.

Marx’s pedagogies in action

Marxist pedagogy is a never-ending alteration between inquiry and presentation. There’s no determinism, no mechanistic causality, no chronological and predictable unfolding of struggle. The entire project of Capital ends with a few dozen lines and then silence: an opening for study and inquiry. This opening, however, isn’t sufficient in itself, for the class struggle also needs to explain concepts, categories, tactics, strategies, and analysis. The key for Marx and for Marxist pedagogy is to keep these in tension, yet the tension will change depending on a host of circumstances.

Marx’s distinction between inquiry and presentation, are not irreconcilable opposites but dialectically related pedagogies. After all, one can’t study a text without first having learned to read. At the same time, learning to read is filled with moments of study. The first is clearer, so I’ll give an example of the latter from my own childhood. I remember learning that “rose” signaled not only a red and thorny flower but also the past tense of rise, and that a ruler referred not only to our main measuring device in school but also to a king, queen, or czar—and later to a state of class domination. I came to learn these are homonyms, or words that share the same spelling but different meanings. Even so, I’ve always found homonyms fascinating educational models that show how even within the developmental process of learning we can make room for inquiry.

An interesting historical example that highlights these divergent pedagogies and their implications for organizing comes from the split between the socialist and communist parties in the 1920s and how the Socialist and Communist Parties organized their youth groups. The Socialist Party believed that cadre had to present radical ideas to children so that children could join the struggle later, when they were older. The Communist Party, on the other hand, believed that children were political actors and agents in the here and now, and brought together inquiry and presentation. As Paul Mishler writes in Raising Reds:

“Rather than being simply educational institutions, controlled by parents and local party organizations, the Communist children’s groups were to be political organizations, fully integrated into the political structure of the party. Communist children’s groups would thus encourage children to engage in political as well as educational activity, and these groups would be separate from direct parental influence… ‘We are not only preparing the child for future participation in the class struggle;–we are leading the child in the class struggle now!” [12].

The Socialist Party maintained that children needed presentation before they could engage in their own action and inquiry, while the Communist Party, following Marx’s pedagogies, engaged children in presentation and inquiry through action. The learned and researched, not only in classrooms and study groups but in the streets as well.

We don’t need to turn to history to see the importance of keeping Marx’s distinct pedagogies in play, however, Consider how, in many organizing meetings, the logic of presentation dominates. I’m not referring to speeches or reading articles, but to the domination of the end goal and, more specifically, an end goal that has to be realizable and “winnable.” This shuts down the process of inquiry and, more specifically, revolutionary inquiry, by keeping us trapped in what we can win without overthrowing capitalism. It keeps us trapped within the present, unable to see beyond it.

As an alternative, we could start with the end goal of the total revolutionary transformation and restructuring of society. This isn’t winnable by any action, protest, campaign, etc., and so the end goal is there, but suspended; it’s not clear how exactly it unfolds. When we start here, with this goal in mind, we open ourselves up to the process of research that Marx held so dear and without which we wouldn’t have Marxism, let alone the Marxist theoretical and practical history on which we draw.

The key point is that Marx left us not only distinct yet dialectically related educational processes; he also offered us examples of navigating between the two, as well as the various factors that shape what ones we engage. It’s not that presentation or inquiry comes first or second, and it’s not that one is good and the other bad. The communist organizer, leader, or teacher has to deploy both depending on different external and class or site-specific contingencies. Sometimes learning must take precedence, and studying must be presented. At other times, studying must take precedence, we must be free to imagine alternatives, get lost in the possibilities, reach our dead ends, and open up inquiry to a new presentation and then to a new inquiry.

This might be what, in part, separates dogmatic Marxists from those who take it as a living, breathing document. The economists, for example, only learned Marx, while those who have made revolutions, or tried to, have engaged Marxism as an infinite well of studying.

Derek R. Ford is assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University and chair of the Education Department at the Hampton Institute. He’s written four monographs, the latest of which is Inhuman educations: Jean-François Lyotard, pedagogy, thought (Brill, 2021). More information can be found at www.derekrford.com

References

[1] Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1979). Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others (circular letter), trans. P. Ross & B. Ross. In Gerasimenko, S., Kalinina, Y., & Vladimirova, A. (Eds.). (1991). Marx and Engels collected works (vol. 45), pp. 394-408. New York: International Publishers, p. 408, emphasis added.

[2] Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1), trans. by Samuel Moore. New York: International Publishers, p. 28.

[3] Hobsbawm, E.J. (1964). Introduction, in K. Marx, Pre-capitalist economic foundations, ed. E.J. Hobsbawm, trans. Jack Cohen (pp. 9-65). New York: International Publishers, p. 10.

[4] Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays, trans. B. Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 70.

[5] Negri, A. (1991). Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. H. Cleaver, M. Ryan, and M. Viano. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, p. 9; 12. Negri was a leading theoretician and organizer of the “autonomous” school that participated in the Italian Civil War in the 1960s-70s before being falsely arrested in 1979 for kidnapping the former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro of the Christian Democratic Party. He was later exonerated, but was still facing 30 years in prison. Yet in 1983, he was elected to Parliament and used Parliamentary immunity to escape to France to continue researching and organizing. He only returned to Italy in 1997 to serve out his remaining (and bargained-down) 13 years to raise awareness of the political prisoners still being held behind bars. While in prison, he co-wrote the (in)famous book Empire with Michael Hardt.

[6] Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). The manifesto of the Communist Party,  In R.C. Tucker (Ed.). (1978). The Marx-Engels reader, 2nd. ed. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 476.

[7] Marx, Capital, p. 225.

[8] Ibid., p. 262 f2.

[9] Ibid., p. 714.

[10] Ibid., p. 715

[11] Ibid.

[12] Mishler, P. (1999). Raising reds: The Young Pioneers, radical summer camps, and communist political culture in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 31.

Paulo Freire and Popular Struggle in South Africa

By Zamalotshwa Sefatsa

Republished from The Tricontinental.

Paulo Freire was a radical educator from Brazil whose work was tied to struggles for human freedom and dignity. He constantly experimented with and thought about how to connect learning and teaching among the poor and oppressed with the radical transformation of society. For Freire, this meant struggling for a world where everyone counts equally and is treated with dignity–a world in which economic and political power are radically democratised.

This dossier, which draws on interviews with participants in a range of struggles in South Africa, shows that Freire’s ideas have been an important influence in the Black Consciousness Movement, the trade union movement, and some of the organisations associated with the United Democratic Front (UDF). His ideas remain influential today, from trade unions to grassroots struggles.

From Brazil to Africa

Freire was born in Recife, a city in north eastern Brazil, in 1921. After his university studies, he became a schoolteacher and began to develop an interest in radical approaches to education, including projects to teach adult literacy. Freire saw the role of community and worker organisations and struggles as vital in the formation of the critical conscience that is required to overcome the domination and dependence of the oppressed.

In Freire’s early works, he wrote that the fundamental goal of radical pedagogy is to develop a critical conscience in individuals. The method of dialogical engagement that he developed from the 1950s onwards became an emancipatory and progressive alternative to the dominant school programmes sponsored by the U.S. government through agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an organisation that is notorious for backing coups against elected governments in Latin America and elsewhere.

In 1964, the Brazilian military seized control of the country with the backing of the United States and imposed a brutal right-wing dictatorship. Freire was among the many people arrested by the dictatorship. After seventy days in prison, he was released and forced to leave the country.

During his years in exile, he continued to carry out his practical work in other countries in Latin America, such as Chile, where he wrote his most important book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and developed adult literacy programmes. He also had significant contact with African freedom struggles. During this time, he visited Zambia, Tanzania, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Angola, and Cape Verde. He met with The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). He developed adult literacy programmes in Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, and Angola.

Freire read extensively about colonisation and its effects on the people, including the writings of African revolutionary intellectuals like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. He felt a special connection to Africa and wrote that ‘[a]s a man from north-eastern Brazil, I was somewhat culturally tied to Africa, particularly to those countries that were unfortunate enough to be colonised by Portugal’.

Freire was also deeply critical of the capitalist system, which exploits and dominates the bodies and minds of the oppressed, and is a major force generating the material and ideological conditions that shape the domination of consciousness. This domination–which, of course, is entwined with racism and sexism–can seep into our being, our actions, and the way that we see the world. Freire argued that learning to fight to overcome domination is difficult but essential political work that requires constant learning.

Freire’s emphasis on the importance of dialogue as the basis for critical consciousness, and his stress on the essential role of popular struggle and organisation, both became important tools in grassroots struggles in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s. In this period in Latin America in general, and Brazil in particular, popular education became synonymous with popular movements that used it as their main educational strategy, uniting political practice and learning processes.

In 1980, Freire returned to Brazil, where he became active in the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). When the party took control of São Paulo (one of the largest cities in the world) in 1988, he was appointed as the city’s secretary of education. He remained in this position until 1991. He died in 1997.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In 1968, whilst he was in exile in Chile, Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. During that year, youth revolts took place around the world. In France, where the revolt was most intense, many young people began to look at the intellectual work produced in the armed struggles against French colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria —including Fanon’s work on the Algerian revolution. This turn to Fanon influenced Freire too. In 1987, Freire recalled that ‘[a] young man who was in Santiago on a political task gave me the book The Wretched of the Earth. I was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the book was almost finished when I read Fanon. I had to rewrite the book’. Freire was deeply influenced by Fanon’s radical humanism, his thinking about the role of university-trained intellectuals in popular struggles, and his warnings about how an elite among the oppressed could become new oppressors.

Freire would write many books in the years to come, but it is Pedagogy of the Oppressed that quickly became and has remained a revolutionary classic. This book has had a powerful impact on popular movements around the world and remains the best introduction to Freire’s ideas.

In a talk given in Durban in 1988, Neville Alexander, who was an important radical intellectual in many fields, including education, explained that: ‘[f]or Freire, the decisive difference between animals and human beings consisted in the ability of the latter to reflect directly on their activity. This ability is, for him, the unique attribute of human consciousness and self-conscious existence and is what makes it possible for people to change their situation’. In other words, for Freire, all people are capable of thought, and critical thought, undertaken collectively, is the basis of organisation and struggle.

Freire argued that oppression dehumanises everyone–both the oppressed and the oppressor–and that emancipatory forms of politics–the strivings of the oppressed for freedom and justice–are, ultimately, a demand ‘for the affirmation of men and women as persons’. He would write that ‘[t]his, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well’.

But, for Freire, there is a danger that the person who is oppressed and wants to be free can come to believe that, to be free, she or he must become like the oppressor: ‘Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors’.(1) Freire believed that political education during a struggle is important in order to help prevent the elites among the oppressed from becoming new oppressors, warning that ‘[w]hen education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to be the oppressor’.

For Freire, the point of freedom is to allow everyone to be fully human; the struggle for freedom must end all oppression. It must be for the liberation of everyone, everywhere, and not just for some. But, he said, there are many different reasons why the oppressed do not always see this clearly. Sometimes the oppressed do not see that they are oppressed because they have been taught to believe that the way things are is ‘normal’ or is their fault. For example, they are taught to believe that they are poor because they do not have enough education, or that others are rich because they have worked harder. Sometimes, they are taught to blame something else (such as ‘the economy’) or someone else (such as ‘foreigners’) for their poverty.

True liberation must start by seeing clearly how things really are. For Freire, this is why radical and collective questioning, discussion, and learning are so important. He argued that, by thinking carefully and critically about how things really are (our actual lives and experiences), we can come to see oppression more accurately so that we can fight more effectively to end it.

The political work of encouraging critical thinking about our situation does not mean encouraging people to just criticise everything; it means always going beyond how things seem by constantly asking questions–especially by asking ‘why?’–to understand the root causes of why things are the way they are, especially things we feel strongly about. Asking questions allows people to draw on their own lived experience and thinking to find their own answers to the question of why they face situations of oppression or injustice. This is very different from traditional education that tries to fill the (apparently empty!) heads of the learners with knowledge that the powerful teacher thinks they need. Freire wrote that ‘[p]rojecting an absolute ignorance onto others [is] a characteristic of the ideology of oppression’. He called the model of education that assumes that the teacher has all the knowledge and the students have none the ‘banking’ concept of education and likened it to a teacher making deposits into an empty bank account. Freire wrote that:

The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert who approaches the people but feels alarm at each step they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose his ‘status,’ remains nostalgic towards his origins.

This is very different from many political education programmes organised by NGOs or small sectarian political groups which assume that the oppressed are ignorant and incapable of thought and that they will bring knowledge to the people. Freire argued that ‘[l]eaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organise the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress’.

Freire also realised that people cannot change situations of oppression and injustice on their own. This means that the struggle for liberation must be collective. He suggested that what he called an ‘animator’ could help. An ‘animator’ may come from outside the life situation of the poor and oppressed but plays a role that helps to encourage the thinking and the life and strength of the people who are in that situation. An animator does not work to assert their own power over the oppressed. An animator works to create a community of inquiry in which everyone can contribute to developing knowledge, and the democratic power of the oppressed can be built. To do this effectively requires humility and love; it is crucial that an animator enters into the lives and world of the poor and oppressed and, in doing so, enters into a true dialogue as equals.

Freire wrote that:

[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.

In genuine dialogue, both the animator and the learners from among the oppressed bring something to this process. Through this dialogue, and through careful, collective, and critical reflection on lived experience, both the learners from among the oppressed and the animator come to be ‘conscientised’; in other words, they come to really understand the nature of oppression. But, for Freire, it is no good to just understand the world; ‘[i]t is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice’.

This action against oppression must always be tied together with careful thinking (reflection) on action, and what has happened as a result of action. Action and reflection are part of an ongoing cycle of transformation that Freire, following Karl Marx, called ‘praxis’.

The Importance of Freire’s Thought in South Africa

Paulo Freire was the key theoretician if you like. But we needed to bring Paulo Freire back from Brazil to the South African context. We knew nothing about Brazil of course except what we were reading. I don’t know of any similar text that we could have used in South Africa then as a way of understanding and engaging the South African context.

— Barney Pityana, a leading intellectual in the Black Consciousness Movement

Though Freire visited many countries in Africa, the apartheid state would not have allowed him to visit South Africa. However, he does discuss South Africa in his books and describes how South African anti-apartheid activists came to see him to talk about his work and what it meant in the South African context. Many of the organisations and movements involved in the anti-apartheid struggle used Freire’s thinking and methods.

The Black Consciousness Movement

Although the apartheid state banned Pedagogy of the Oppressed, underground copies circulated. By the early 1970s, Freire’s work was already being used within South Africa. Leslie Hadfield, an academic who has written about the use of Freire’s work by the Black Consciousness Movement, argues that the Pedagogy of the Oppressed first arrived in South Africa in the early 1970s via the University Christian Movement (UCM), which began to run Freire-inspired literacy projects. The UCM worked closely with the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso), which was founded in 1968 by Steve Biko, along with other figures like Barney Pityana and Aubrey Mokoape. Saso was the first of a series of organisations that, together, made up the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM).

Anne Hope, a Christian radical from Johannesburg and a member of the Grail, a Christian women’s organisation committed to ‘a world transformed in love and justice’, met Freire at Harvard University in Boston in 1969, and then again in Tanzania. After she returned to South Africa in 1971, Biko asked her to work with the Saso leadership for six months on Freire’s participatory methods. Biko and fourteen other activists were trained in Freirean methods in monthly workshops. Bennie Khoapa, a significant figure in the BCM, recalled that ‘Paulo Freire … made a lasting philosophical impression on Steve Biko’.

Between these workshops, the activists went out to do community-based research as part of a process of conscientisation. Barney Pityana remembers that:

Anne Hope would run what essentially was literacy training, but it was literacy training of a different kind because it was Paulo Freirean literacy training that was really taking human experience into the way of understanding concepts. It was drawing from everyday experience and understanding: what impacts it makes in the mind, the learning and understanding that they had.

For some of us, I suspect it was the first time that we came across Paulo Freire; for me it certainly was, but Steve, Steve Biko was a very diverse reading person, lots of things that Steve knew, we didn’t know. And so, in his reading he came across Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and began to apply it in his explanation of the oppressive system in South Africa.

Echoing Freire’s argument that it is only the oppressed who can liberate everyone, the BCM emphasised the importance of black people leading the struggle against apartheid. Freire had also stressed that, ‘[w]ithout a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle’. This, too, resonated with the BCM, which affirmed a proud and strong black identity against white supremacy.

The movement drew directly on Freire as it developed a constant process of critical reflection, part of an ongoing project of conscientisation. Aubrey Mokoape, who had a background in the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and became an older mentor to the students who founded Saso, explains that the link between Black Consciousness and ‘conscientisation’ is clear:

The only way to overthrow this government is to get the mass of our people understanding what we want to do and owning the process, in other words, becoming conscious of their position in society, in other words … joining the dots, understanding that if you don’t have money to pay … for your child’s school fees, fees at medical school, you do not have adequate housing, you have poor transport, how those things all form a single continuum; that all those things are actually connected. They are embedded in the system, that your position in society is not isolated but it is systemic.

The Church

In 1972, Biko and Bokwe Mafuna (who had been part of the training in Freirean methods) were employed as field officers by Bennie Khoapa. Khoapa was the head of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the Christian Institute’s Black Community Projects (BCP) and had also been trained in Freirean methods. The BCP’s work was heavily influenced by Freire. Both the BCM and the Christian Churches in South Africa drew on liberation theology, a school of radical thought which Freire had both been influenced by and contributed to. Rubin Phillip, who was elected as deputy president of Saso in 1972, and went on to become an Anglican archbishop, explains that:

Paulo Freire is considered one of the founders of liberation theology. He was a Christian who lived his faith in a liberating way. Paulo placed the poor and oppressed at the centre of his method, which is important in the concept of the preferential option for the poor, a trademark of liberation theology.

In South Africa, ideas drawn from liberation theology were–together with the black liberation theology developed by James H. Cone in the United States–a powerful influence on various currents of struggle. Bishop Rubin recalls that:

The one thing I took away from our conversation was a need to be critical thinkers. … Liberation theologians allude that theology, like education, should be for liberation, not domestication. Religion made us subservient, has made us lazy to use our critical faculty and connect knowledge to our everyday reality. So, education for him is about …. a critical way of life and about connecting knowledge to how we live.

The Workers’ Movement

The Black Consciousness Movement included workers’ organisations like the Black Workers’ Project, a joint project between the BCP and Saso. The workers’ movement was also influenced by Freirean ideas through worker education projects that started in the 1970s. One of these was the Urban Training Programme (UTP), which used the Young Christian Workers’ See-Judge-Act methodology, which had influenced Freire’s own thinking and methodology. The UTP used this method to encourage workers to reflect on their everyday experiences, think about what they could do about their situation, and then act to change the world. Other worker education projects were started by left students in and around the National Union of South African Students (Nusas). Saso had split from Nusas in 1968 but, although largely white, Nusas was a consciously anti-apartheid organisation that was also influenced by Freire, primarily through members who were also part of the UCM.

During the 1970s, Wages Commissions were set up at the University of Natal, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of Cape Town. Using the resources of the universities and some progressive unions, the Commissions helped to set up structures that led to the formation of the Western Province Workers’ Advice Bureau (WPWAB) in Cape Town, the General Factory Workers’ Benefit Fund (GFWBF) in Durban, and the Industrial Aid Society (IAS) in Johannesburg. A number of left students supported these initiatives, as did some older trade unionists, such as Harriet Bolton in Durban. In Durban, Rick Turner, a radical academic whose teaching style was influenced by Freire, became an influential figure among a number of students. Turner was committed to a future rooted in participatory democracy and many of his students became committed activists.

David Hemson, a participant in this milieu, explains that:

Two particular minds were at work, one [Turner] in a wood and iron house in Bellair; and another [Biko] in the shadow of the reeking, rumbling Wentworth oil refinery in the Alan Taylor residence. Both would become close friends and both would die at the hands of the apartheid security apparatus after bursts of energetic writing and political engagement. Both were influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and these ideas and concepts infused and were woven into their writings striving for freedom.

Omar Badsha was one of the students who was close to Turner and participated in setting up the Institute for Industrial Education (IIE). He recalls that:

Rick Turner was very interested in education, and like any intellectual we began reading, and one of the texts we read was Paulo Freire’s book that had just come out not so long ago at the time. And this book resonated with us in the sense that here were some valuable ideas about teaching and an affirmative way of teaching–taking into account the audience and how to relate with the audience.

In January 1973, workers across Durban went on strike, an event that is now seen as a major turning point in worker organisation and resistance to apartheid. Hemson recalls that:

Out of the dawn they streamed, from the barrack-like hostels of Coronation Bricks, the expansive textile mills of Pinetown, the municipal compounds, great factories, mills and plants and the lesser Five Roses tea processing plant. The downtrodden and exploited rose to their feet and hammered the bosses and their regime. Only in the group, the assembled pickets, the leaderless mass meetings of strikers, the gatherings of locked out workers did the individual expression have confidence. The solid order of apartheid cracked and new freedoms were born. New concepts took human form: the weaver became the shop steward, a mass organised overtook the unorganised, the textile trainer a dedicated trade unionist, the shy older man a reborn Congress veteran, a sweeper a defined general worker.

After the Durban Moment

The period in Durban before and during the 1973 strikes came to be known as the Durban Moment. With Biko and Turner as its two charismatic figures, this was a time of important political creativity that laid the foundations for much of the struggle to come.

But in March 1973, the state banned Biko and Turner, along with several BCM and Nusas leaders, including Rubin Phillip. Despite this, as unions were formed in the wake of the strikes, a number of university-trained intellectuals, often influenced by Freire, began working in and with the unions, which made rapid advances. In 1976, the Soweto revolt, which was directly influenced by Black Consciousness, opened a new chapter in the struggle and shifted the centre of contestation to Johannesburg.

Biko was murdered in police custody in 1977, after which the Black Consciousness organisations were banned. In the following year, Turner was assassinated.

In 1979, a number of unions were united into the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu), which was–in the spirit of the Durban Moment–strongly committed to democratic workers’ control in unions and on the shop floor, as well as the political empowerment of shop stewards.

In 1983, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed in Cape Town. It united community-based organisations across the country with a commitment to bottom-up democratic praxis in the present and a vision of a radically democratic future after apartheid. By the mid 1980s, millions of people were mobilised through the UDF and the trade union movement, which became federated through the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985.

Throughout this period, Freirean ideas absorbed and developed in the Durban Moment were often central to thinking about political education and praxis. Anne Hope and Sally Timmel wrote Training for Transformation, a three-volume workbook that aimed to apply Freire’s methods for developing radical praxis in the context of emancipatory struggles in Southern Africa. The first volume was published in Zimbabwe in 1984. It was swiftly banned in South Africa but was widely circulated underground. Training for Transformation was used in political education work in both the trade union movement and the community-based struggles that were linked together through the UDF.

Salim Vally, an activist and academic, recalls that ‘literacy groups of the 80s, some pre-school groups, worker education and people’s education movements were deeply influenced by Freire’. The South African Committee for Higher Education (Sached) also came to be strongly influenced by Freire. The Committee, first formed in 1959 in opposition to the apartheid state’s enforcement of segregation at universities, provided educational support to trade unions and community-based movements in the 1980s. Vally notes that ‘Neville Alexander always discussed Freire in Sached–he was the Cape Town director–and in other education circles he was involved in. John Samuels–the national director of Sached–met Freire in Geneva’.

From 1986, the idea of ‘people’s power’ became very important in popular struggles, but practices and understandings of what this meant varied widely. Some saw the people as a battering ram clearing the way for the ANC to return from exile and the underground and take power over society. Others thought that building democratic practices and structures in trade unions and community organisations marked the beginning of the work required to build a post-apartheid future in which participatory democracy would be deeply entrenched in ordinary life–in workplaces, communities, schools, universities, etc. This was what was meant by the trade union slogan ‘building tomorrow today’.

Though there were strong Freirean currents in this period, they were significantly weakened by the militarisation of politics in the late 1980s, and more so when the ban on the ANC was lifted in 1990. The return of the ANC from exile and the underground led to a deliberate demobilisation of community-based struggles and the direct subordination of the trade union movement to the authority of the ANC. The situation was not unlike that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth:

Today, the party’s mission is to deliver to the people the instructions which issue from the summit. There no longer exists the fruitful give-and-take from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom which creates and guarantees democracy in a party. Quite on the contrary, the party has made itself into a screen between the masses and the leaders.

Paulo Freire Today

Freirean ideas continued to thrive after apartheid in some of the fissures of the new order. For instance, in the early years of the democratic dispensation, the Workers’ College in Durban, a trade union education project, included some teachers who were committed to Freirean methods. Mabogo More, a philosopher with a background in the Black Consciousness Movement, was one of these teachers. He recalls that he first came to know about Freire as a student at The University of the North (also known as ‘Turfloop’) in the 1970s ‘through Saso’s concept of “conscientisation” used during formation winter schools organised by Saso. Later, S’bu Ndebele, a Turfloop librarian at the time, smuggled a copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which, together with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, we surreptitiously read among ourselves as conscientised students’.

In 1994, More was able to attend a lecture by Freire at Harvard University in the United States. He says that ‘Freire’s lecture was fascinating and helped in modelling my teaching practice in line with the precepts articulated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.

Today, a number of organisations remain committed to Freirean methods, such as the Umtapo Centre in Durban. The Centre was started in Durban in 1986 as a response to the rise of political violence within black communities. It has roots in the Black Consciousness Movement and its work is explicitly based on Freire’s methodology.

Another organisation that uses Freire’s ideas is the Church Land Programme (CLP) in Pietermaritzburg, which has its roots in the liberation theology tradition and is closely linked to Bishop Rubin, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and a number of other grassroots organisations and struggles. CLP was established in 1996 in response to the land reform process taking place in South Africa and became an independent organisation in 1997. By the early 2000s, CLP realised that the struggle against apartheid had not led to an end to oppression, that the state’s land reform programme was not taking an emancipatory direction, and that its own work was not helping to end oppression. Therefore, CLP decided to incorporate Freire’s idea of animation and enter into solidarity with new struggles.

Zodwa Nsibande, an animator with CLP, says that:

In our engagements, we let people think because we do not want to take their agency. We ask probing questions to get people to think about their lived experiences. We embrace Paulo Freire’s thinking when he said that ‘problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming’. When we engage with communities using problem-posing methodologies, we seek to give them their power. Sibabuyisele isithunzi sabo, ngoba sikholwa ukuthi ngenkathi umcindezeli ecindezela ususa isthunzi somcindezelwa. Thina sibuyisela isithunzi somcindezelwa esisuswa yisihluku sokucindezelwa [We restore their dignity, for we believe that when the oppressor oppresses, he takes the dignity of the oppressed. We restore the dignity of the oppressed that is taken by the cruelty of oppression].

In recent years, connections to the Landless Workers’ Movement, or the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), in Brazil have reenergised the potency of Freire’s ideas in South Africa. Formed in 1984, the MST has mobilised millions of people and organised thousands of occupations of unproductive land. The organisation has built close relationships with the National Union of Metalworkers in South Africa (Numsa), the largest trade union in South Africa, and with Abahlali baseMjondolo, the country’s largest popular movement. This has meant that a number of activists from Numsa and Abahlali baseMjondolo have been able to participate in the programmes at the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF), the MST’s political education school.

There are direct connections between activists’ experiences at the ENFF and the establishment of political schools in South Africa, such as The Frantz Fanon Political School built and managed by Abahlali baseMjondolo on the eKhenana Land Occupation in Durban.

Vuyolwethu Toli, who is the Numsa JC Bez Regional Education Officer, explains that:

The schooling systems in South Africa and throughout the world use the banking method of education where there aren’t reciprocal or mutual learning processes. The teacher, or whoever is facilitating, positions themself as the dominant knowledge disseminator where they see themself as having a monopoly of wisdom. As comrades responsible for popular education in the trade union, we do not operate like this. We make sure there is collective knowledge production and that all sessions are informed by workers’ lived experiences. Our point of departure is that worker knowledge informs the content and not the other way around. We don’t believe in the banking method of education.

Freire’s ideas, first generated in Brazil, have influenced struggles all over the world. Almost fifty years after they began to influence intellectuals and movements in South Africa, they remain relevant and powerful. The work of conscientisation is a permanent commitment, a way of life. As Aubrey Mokoape said, ‘[c]onsciousness has no end. And consciousness has no real beginning’.

Acknowledgements

This dossier was researched and written by Zamalotshwa Sefatsa.

We would like to thank the following people for agreeing to be interviewed for this dossier:

Omar Badsha, Judy Favish, David Hemson, Aubrey Mokoape, Mabogo More, Zodwa Nsibande, David Ntseng, John Pampallis, Bishop Rubin Phillip, Barney Pityana, Patricia (Pat) Horn, Vuyolwethu Toli, Salim Vally, and S’bu Zikode.

We would also like to thank the following organisations for contributing to the research that informed this dossier:

Abahlali baseMjondolo, The Church Land Programme, Levante Popular da Juventude (‘Popular Youth Uprising’), The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, The Paulo Freire National School, and The Umtapo Centre.

We would also like to thank Anne Harley, whose pioneering work on Freire’s ideas in South Africa opened the door for much of the work done here, and who offered generous support to the production of this dossier.

Further Reading

Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. Johannesburg: Raven Press. 1996.

Friedman, Steven. Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 1970-1984. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.1987

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. 1976.

Freire, Paulo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin. 1993.

Freire, Paulo and Macedo, Donaldo. (1987). Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Routledge. 1987.

Hadfield, Leslie. Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 1996

Macqueen, Ian. Black Consciousness and Progressive Movements under Apartheid. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008

Magaziner, Dan. The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977. Johannesburg: Jacana. 2008

More, Mabogo. Philosophy, Identity and Liberation. Pretoria: HSRC Press. 2017.

Pityana, Barney; Ramphele, Mamphele; Mpumlwana, Malusi and Wilson, Lindy (Eds.) Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko & Black Consciousness. David Philip, Cape Town. 2006.

Turner, Rick. The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa. Johannesburg. Ravan Press. 1980.

Notes

1. In reading Freire’s writings and his use of gendered language such as ‘men’ to mean ‘human’, which was still common in the late 1960s, we must undertake the intellectual exercise of entering into dialogue with his gendered forms of expression with the aim of critical reflection and developing emancipatory alternatives.

About The Tricontinental

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. We seek to bridge gaps in our knowledge about the political economy as well as social hierarchy that will facilitate the work of our political movements and involve ourselves in the “battle of ideas” to fight against bourgeois ideology that has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media.

Communist Study: Introduction to Partisan Educational Theory

By Derek R. Ford

This is the introductory chapter to Communist Study: Education for the Commons (2016), which argues that capitalism rests on a certain educational logic, and that political struggles looking to move beyond capitalism need to develop and practice oppositional modes of education .

While Margaret Thatcher tends to get the credit for saying that "there is no such thing as society," it was none other than Karl Marx who, in The Poverty of Philosophy, first-and for quite different reasons-contested that such a thing as society existed. For Marx the term society was too loose and static, too moralistic and jurisprudential; it wasn't dialectical or historical enough to account for the constantly changing state of things, for the complexity and dynamism of life. In its place, Marx proposed the concept of "social formation." [1] In the clear, careful, and patient manner that is characteristic of his work, Althusser spells out for us just what a social formation is, and why this concept is vital for Marx and for those of us who want to make a new world, a world that we deserve. In each social formation there exist multiple modes of production (at least two), one of which is always dominant, and others of which are either going out of or struggling to come into existence. A mode of production is, well, a way of producing things, an arrangement between the productive forces and the relations of production, between the objects and instruments of labor, on the one hand, and between those who relate to them and to each other, on the other.

Under the capitalist mode of production, the relations of production are inherently and unalterably relations of exploitation. There are those who work on the means of production and those who own the means of production, and the latter group appropriates what is produced, returning some to the worker in the form of wages and keeping the rest for themselves (and the landlord, the state, and the banker). There is always a struggle over how the value produced will be apportioned, what amount will return to the one who produced it and what amount will be taken by the owner; wages correspond to the level of class struggle at any given moment and in any given place. The relations of production under capitalism are therefore not of a technical or legal nature, but a social one. It is, then, the whole social and economic system that has to be overthrown: the working class has to have control over the productive forces and new relations of production have to be established.[2]

Althusser's presentation of social formations and modes of production is so appealing, for one, because of the way in which he makes clear that antagonistic modes of production co-exist along with as the capitalist mode of production. Thus, Althusser gives us a way to understand that the primary contradiction at the time of his writing was not necessarilywithin the capitalist mode of production but rather between the capitalist mode of production and the socialist mode of production, which in the early 1970s was a considerable portion of the globe.[3] For two, however, Althusser's formulation is appealing because of the way that it demonstrates the centrality of the social relations of production. Althusser states upfront that the relations of production aredeterminant in the reproduction of a social formation. [4] After all, that is why Althusser was interested in the ideological state apparatuses in the first place: they are "the number one object of the class struggle" because of their central role in the reproduction of the relations of production. [5]

The materialist method indicates that any new production relations and forces won't materialize out of thin air, which seems to me an important but fundamentally neglected insight when examining the history of the international communist movement. All too often socialist states are evaluated according to a checklist drawn up in the halls of academe by romantic, utopian intellectuals. But I digress. [6] The theory of immanence that is fundamental to the materialist method holds that it is only out of existing conditions that the future emerges, that we can glimpse alternative realities within the present, that hegemony is loosely stitched together, and composed of fabric and thread from the past. With the right alteration the whole thing can unravel. This is precisely why Althusser insists on the coexistence of multiple modes of production within any given social formation: multiple sets of production relations and forces can be blocked together, locked in struggles that are at times latent and at other times explosive. The question is how to locate and latch onto the germ of the future from within the present, at least that's the question for those of us who yearn for a different world.

That's also the question that motives this study. What I set out to do in this book is to locate antagonistic elements of subjectivity and modes of being that are immanent in the present, to understand these subjectivities in their necessary relationship to the mode of production, and to posit some ways that these elements can be seized upon by educators and political organizers. In this way, it's a political and intellectual book, and it's a deeply intimate one, too. This project embodies tensions that I have felt all of my life, tensions that Peter McLaren calls enfleshment, or "the mutually constitutive enfolding of social structure and desire… the dialectical relationship between the material organization of interiority and the cultural modes of materiality we inhabit subjectively." [7] This phrase, "the material organization of interiority" is a particularly profound one, for it so closely links politics to the subject, intimating two types of interiority: the interiority of the subject and the various forms of interiority that, together, we constantly construct (the domus, the collective, the classroom, etc.). [8] The co-intimacies are always experienced through the reigning mode of production, which is not external to social relations or to subjectivity itself.

The social and economic contradictions of capitalism run through us, as do the contradictions between the capitalist mode of production and other, ascending or descending modes of production. We can feel exploitation in our interior, but we can also feel solidarity there, nudging its way in. We organize with our fellow workers and students because our material conditions force us to, because we need more, want something else, but also because organizing, in its best moments, can produce a sublime feeling of being-in-common. While we are shoulder to shoulder with others fighting against a common enemy we experience a mode of collectivity that capitalism can never capture, a form of subjectification that exceeds any already existing conceptual framework. Now, anyone who has done even a quick stint as an organizer knows that a lot of other feelings can be produced, too, feelings that can divide us, make us anxious, cynical, and paranoid. Yet this is nothing but another testament to the blocking together of multiple forms of social relations that are vying for dominance.

I was an organizer and a communist before entering the field of education, and one of the reasons that I was drawn to the field was because of the ways in which I also got these sublime feelings when reading and thinking about, and wrestling with, ideas with others. When I harken back, the best educational experiences for me have been indistinguishable from the best political experiences. The research that I have done over the past several years has given me some tools, concepts, problems, and frameworks with which to theorize these feelings that I've had with others and how they relate to the social formation. This theorization resulted in the formation of a pedagogical constellation, and this book is a journey through that constellation.

In astronomy, a constellation is a way of grouping areas of the celestial sphere. The first constellations were determined by farmers who were looking for additional indicators of the changing of seasons, and today they are determined by the International Astronomical Union. Constellations are a way of framing and grouping the sky. Tyson Lewis has suggested that we should think of educational philosophy and practice as a constellation. A pedagogical constellation, then, "does not collapse differences between concepts, nor does it simply valorize one conceptual model over the other. Rather, they hang precariously together, maintaining an absent center." [9] Lewis is careful to note that this constellation can't be purely subjective, but has to "have an objective and necessary dimension." [10] Whereas Lewis argues that this dimension is the "exacting imagination," I hold that it is the social relations of production that fills the spaces and connects the relations between concepts, and the communist program that motivates the assembling of the constellation in the first place.

The communist educational program was in many ways the topic of my first book, Marx, Capital, and Education: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Becoming , which I penned with my comrade and colleague Curry Malott. [11] We wrote that book in a fever, egged on by the need to locate critical education within the history of actually existing struggles against imperialism, exploitation, and oppression. This meant that we had to go back to Marx, and that we especially had to do some systematic and educational readings of the three volumes of Capital. Everywhere in education, in every other journal article or conference paper, we encountered this term "neoliberalism." That was good, we thought, because there can be no doubt that we, in the U.S., are in an intense struggle over accumulation by educational dispossession. So much of this trajectory of educational research, however, left us dissatisfied: the disconnection of neoliberalism from capitalism, the dismissal and demonization of the actually-existing workers' struggle (and the social formations it produced), the lack of any real systemic engagement with marxism, the emphasis on analysis at the expense of action, the reluctance to formulate a political program, silence on imperialist war, and an embrace of essentialist identity politics. We composed the book as an intervention into the field. We provided an antidote to the bland critiques of neoliberalism in education; we centered the law and logic of value, the dialectic, and negation; read the Ferguson protests through the lens of Capital and Harry Haywood-the self-proclaimed "Black Bolshevik"-and his theory of the oppressed Black nation within the U.S.; located neoliberalism as a strategy within the global class war; and pushed back against the idealistic and anti-communist critiques of actually-existing socialism.

Sending a manuscript off to press is rarely a satisfying thing, because as soon as you click "send" you've already thought of too many things to add, tweak, or test. And so writing a book or an article is less about completing something and more about starting something, opening new lines of inquiry or starting new political projects. Marx, Capital, and Education was no exception to this, and before it had manifested as a physical object we were both our pursuing new themes. Curry ended up writing History and Education, which confronts the deep-seated anti-communism in critical pedagogy and the academic Left more generally by expanding on the concept of the global class war, which we dedicated a chapter to in our book and which was begging for more analysis. As for me, I started contemplating a word that we had placed in Marx, Capital, and Education's subtitle: pedagogy. "Just what the hell is pedagogy?" I kept asking myself. I had read and written the word countless times, had gone through a graduate program in education, but I didn't have a grasp on what it meant.

After some digging, I came to realize that I wasn't alone. Sure, some scholars and researchers used "pedagogy" in a very clear sense: to them it was a method of teaching. But that seemed not only boring, but also definitely at odds with the critical tradition (critical pedagogy insists that it is not a method, but a practice). [12] As I started to take the claim seriously, though, I started to come around a bit to the position that pedagogy is a method. In the opening pages of History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukàcs asks what orthodox Marxism is. He tells us that if all of Marx's theses were disproven, even then "every serious 'orthodox' Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx's theses in toto-without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment." [13] This, Lukàcs says, is so because "orthodoxy refers exclusively to method," which for a marxist is dialectical materialism. And dialectical materialism is all about processes and relations, both of which imply constant change.[14] Indeed, the dialectic is what allowed Marx to study capital, which he defined as a social relation. Given this, it makes little sense to institute a binary between a method and a practice, as the marxist method is the practice of applying dialectical materialism to understand processes and relations.

In the spirit of the dialectic, the best educational theorists use pedagogy to name an educational relation. Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, wrote at length regarding the dialogic relationship between teacher and student, the hyphen between what he termed the teacher-student and the student-teacher. [15] A central axiom of the book is that the teacher and the student must relate as agents who are encountering each other and, through dialogue, naming their world. This axiom, however, can't be divorced from another, which is the commitment to ending oppression and exploitation, what Freire called the process of humanization. What makes the relationship educational is this second axiom, for education always needs an end. [16] This is exactly what McLaren means when he insists, "ideological paths chosen by teachers are the fundamental stuff of Freirean pedagogy." [17] McLaren has been hard at work over the last two decades to theorize the ideological paths that lead toward the ends of this pedagogy by fleshing out a revolutionary critical pedagogy, upon which Marx, Capital, and Education was built.[18]

The pedagogical relation, in this tradition, is about opening ourselves up to the possibility that things can be otherwise than they are, that a world without exploitation and oppression can exist, and that, through struggle, we can create that world. As Antonia Darder writes, the purpose of pedagogy is to "engage the world with its complexity and fullness in order to reveal the possibilities of new ways of constructing thought and action beyond the original state."[19] Pedagogy, for McLaren, "is the telling of the story of the 'something more' that can be dreamed only when domination and exploitation are named and challenged."[20] This is a pedagogy that seeks a way out of the present through the cultivation of imagination and the formation of dissidence and resistance. The relationship between the present and the future was an animating theme of Marx, Capital, and Education, and it is why the book insisted on the process of becoming. What I came to realize, however, was that I needed something more here. As an educational theorist, I felt it was my duty to think more carefully and experimentally about how pedagogy bridges the gap between what is and what can be, while respecting the gap and its uncertainty and figurality. How can pedagogy respect the gap's ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project?

A pedagogical constellation

The pedagogical constellation constructed in the following pages is animated by these concerns. I demonstrate some ways that pedagogy can help materialize social relations and activate subjectivities that are not just antagonistic to capital, but conducive to the communist project. When I write about the communist project I mean something particular and something general, something old, something new, and something unknown. After the overthrow and dissolution of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in 1989-1991, communism fell into disrepute. The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and global economic crisis of 2007-2008, however, turned the tide, and history restarted. Communism reappeared once again as a Left sign. In response, a "new communism" has emerged as a pole to be struggled over. There are multiple takes on this new communism, from Alain Badiou's notion of communism as an Idea, an abstract truth procedure that synthesizes history, politics, and the subject, to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Spinozist communism as the absolute democracy of singularities.[21] Jodi Dean's take is that we mustn't equate communism with democracy. We live in the age of democracy, and so to organize around "radical" or "absolute" democracy implies an extension of the system as it is, signals that through inclusion democracy can be radically transformed. [22] While it is true, as Alex Means notes, that Lenin and Marx sometimes used the term "proletarian democracy" to describe communism, the situation today is considerably different.[23] Not only do the masses in capitalist countries today have access to the mechanisms of democracy, but democracy defines the contemporary moment. One could argue that we should struggle over the meaning of democracy, but this, I hold, is not only a dead end pragmatically (for it only reaffirms democracy's hegemony), but is incorrect politically. Democracy necessitates inclusion and participation and fails to name the exclusions and divisions that make politics possible.[24] Democracy names a commons; communism names a commons against.

Not all of the cartographers that travel with me to chart this communist constellation fit within the communist tradition, and in fact some of my co-thinkers have made explicit breaks from the communist movement. While I don't let them off the hook so easily, neither do I attempt to force them neatly into the communist project. There is a resulting tension that runs through the book, a tension that I hope readers find both productive and troubling. I'm familiar with the rash of Marxist/post-al debates that dominated so much of academia during 1990s. To be quite honest, I'm not especially interested in them, or in rehearsing the arguments, or in drawing up some sort of balance sheet on the matter. It's not so much that the categories and stakes of these debates aren't significant (they certainly are), but that the debates became so narrowed and debilitated, so narrowing and debilitating. They are, if I may say so, played out. My position is that we shouldn't allow ideological disagreements to prevent us from communicating with, or culling insights from, one another. It's not to say that ideological unity and clarity aren't important, but that this unity is always the result of struggle and practice, not a priori literary battles. So I chose my co-thinkers in this book because they have helped me conceptualize the relations that pedagogy can engender, how these relations relate to the varying kinds of social relations of production, and how we can link the educational relation to the struggle for a new social formation.

Foundational to this project is the idea that subjectivity is historical and material, that subjectivity changes, and that these changes have a relationship to production relations. The predominant form of the subject today, it appears, is the individual. Dean thus writes that "our political problem differs in a fundamental way from that of communists at the beginning of the twentieth century-we have to organize individuals; they had to organize masses." [25] This book begins with an inquiry into the individualized state of subjectivity today. The first chapter brings Judith Butler's theory of normative and performative constitution of the subject into the field of capital. I elaborate the social, juridical, and economic conditions of industrial capital accumulation and, reading Butler with Marx, I argue that the norms through which the subject comes to be constituted as an individual in the modern era are fundamentally connected with modern capitalism. In other words, the subjectivity of the individual is required for capitalist accumulation in the industrial era. The individual, however, is just one way in which subjectivity is produced under capitalism, for capitalism atomizes people at the same time as it concentrates them in space, alienating people from each other while developing sophisticated means of transportation and communication. These contradictions of capital are contradictions that are played out on the field of the subject, which both acts on and reacts to the mode of production. As a result, when I move to an examination of recent transformations that have taken place in capitalism, the move away from the industrial era, I pay special attention to the interaction between subjects and the means of production, although I also bring the economic contradictions of capitalism-overaccumulation and the falling rate of profit-into play.

These recent transformations have to do with the incorporation of subjectivity into capitalism as an element of fixed capital-what Marx labeled the "general intellect"-and the increasing importance of subjectivity and sociality in the production and realization of value. Following Maurizio Lazzarato I define the contemporary phase of capitalism as the "immaterial era." The immaterial era of capitalism, I claim, follows from the industrial era, and it represents a transformation within the capitalist mode of production, not a new mode of production. I caution against fetishizing immaterial production, a charge I level against Hardt and Negri, who recognize the corporeality of immaterial production but still harp on its "infinite reproducibility." This isn't just an esoteric distinction, for recognizing the inherently material nature of immaterial production directs our attention to the necessity of seizing the state and other forms of power. Power is not everywhere and nowhere. The bourgeoisie takes up specific spaces-they have names and addresses. After articulating what I mean by immaterial production as a transformation within the capitalist mode of production in the second chapter, I show how as the mode of production transitions into the immaterial era the norms that render the subject an individual become challenged. Here I return to Butler to show that instead of sovereign, autonomous, and atomized, in immaterial production we begin to experience ourselves and each other as dependent, opaque, and relational. Butler's conception of the subject becomes rooted as part of the capitalist mode of production, providing a material basis for her conception. While I agree with Dean that the individual is a dominant form of subjectivity today, I take issue with its prevalence, contending instead that it is constantly being challenged, both in the realm of production and in the "everyday."

Butler gives us a rich theorization of subject constitution and contemporary subject formation. Her descriptions of the ways in which we are unendingly and irretrievably bound up with each other, the ways that we are permanently dependent on each other and, as a result, forever other to ourselves, powerfully illustrate the commonness that communism is about. These attributes of contemporary subjectivity both correspond with and trouble the capitalist mode of production. Maybe they signal the emergence of an ascendant mode of production. But there is a primary contradiction within contemporary subject formation and between it and operations of capital: while a new commonness is being forged through the productive networks of society, society is increasingly polarized along lines of class and identity. Communist pedagogy, in turn, has to offer theorizations of commonness that are rooted in the material realities of everyday life. Moreover, the rule of private property bears a particular relationship to the political form of democracy, and taken together capitalism and democracy have a definite educational logic. The rest of the book gets at this knot by turning to the concept of study, which I figure as not just an alternative educational logic, but an oppositional educational logic, as a way of forging not just commonness, but commonness against.

In the third chapter I begin developing the concept of study, the central pedagogical concept in this book's constellation. The philosopher who has most richly developed study is Lewis, who takes Agamben's notion of potentiality and positions it against biocapitalism and its educational logic: the logic of learning. Biocapitalism is a form of capitalism that doesn't use up labor-power so much as it continually reinvests in it, remaking it over and over again. This reinvestment takes place through lifelong learning, in which we continually remake ourselves to fit the ever-changing demands of global capitalism. "Learning is," as Lewis formulates it at one point, "the putting to work of potentiality in the name of self-actualization and economic viability… Learning has thus become a biotechnology for managing and measuring the nebulous force, power, or will of potentiality." [26] Potentiality, of course, is only good for capital if it is actualized. Otherwise it is wasted potential. Agamben provides Lewis with another notion of potentiality, a potentiality not to be, and Lewis develops his theory of studying on this notion.

Whereas learning is always directed by predetermined and measurable ends, studying is about pure means, about exploring, wandering, getting lost in thought, forgetting what one knows so that one can discover that the world exists otherwise than the way that one knows it. Studying is, I think, the educational equivalent of flirting. When flirting with another, I and that other sway between "we can, we cannot." Each gesture, touch, or phrase proposes potential as it withdraws into impotential. We are neither committed nor un-committed to each other; we are not not-committed. Like flirting, studying is a contradictory feeling of exhilaration and dismay, anxiety and excitement, the pleasure of exploration and the pain of the unfamiliar. Studying can't be graded or measured; it is concerned only with use and not with exchange. Studying isn't only a wandering about, however, it's also a fleeing from, a stateless state of fugitivity, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten put it. Harney and Moten more radically politicize studying by linking it to the undercommons, the label that they give to the spaces and relations that resist capitalist enclosures. In the undercommons we study together, bonded by our mutual indebtedness, or what Butler would call our mutual and inescapable dependency.

To further develop the concept of study, how studying can be in opposition to capital, and how educators can enact study, I turn to the thought of Jean-François Lyotard in chapters four, five, and six. While Lyotard's work has ignited more than a few debates in education and in critical theory, these debates have focused almost exclusively on his short book, The Postmodern Condition, a book that Lyotard refers to as "an occasional one," as nothing more than a "report." [27] The almost exclusive focus on this book in education has drawn our attention away from the rich body of Lyotard's work, which is rife with educational lessons. In chapter five I connect The Postmodern Condition to Lyotard's larger philosophical endeavors, revealing why a focus on that particular book has created misunderstandings in educational thought. The connecting point here is Lyotard's writing on "the system," which for Lyotard is the economic system of capitalism and the political system of liberal democracy. Lyotard helps us see how certain forms of difference and alterity can circulate quite productively within capitalism, including postmodernism itself. While many have noted that today capitalism thrives on difference and individuality, they have missed the mark: difference and individuality-alterity-have to first be brought to signification, have to be made public. There are very real limits to what signified subjectivities and beliefs can be accommodated within capitalism, of course, that Lyotard and some of his followers haven't appreciated because of their political commitments. But the central insight is that, like the demand for actualization, capital demands that the subject be made public, express itself.

While the demand for actualization represses the potentiality not to be, the demand for publicity represses the subject's secret life. The subject's internal alterity, a "no-man's land" where we can meet ourselves and others, is the place from where thought comes. The secret is, by definition, incommunicable, but this in no way prevents it from being a common region. The alterity that I am after here is not about individualized difference but about solidarity, forms of togetherness that capital can't capture, forms of collectivity that perpetually resist. The secret is a region, then, that we can't exactly know, that we can only encounter: it's a place of study. The political thrust behind the demand for constant communication and for endless articulation is at the heart of the democratic project, and a critique of democracy is the subject of the fifth chapter. Lyotard's problem is not with expression itself, but rather when the general-or public-life seeks to take hold of the secret life. Democracy, by compelling the subject to babble endlessly, by fashioning subjects that compel themselves and others to communicate, inaugurates what Lyotard calls terror. This is a terror to which pedagogy, as something that necessarily involves communication, is susceptible. I spend part of this chapter demonstrating how complicit critical pedagogy and its critics have been in this terror.

There is an irreducible antagonism between democracy and the secret, for the former requires transparency, dialogue and deliberation, and visibility, while the latter is opaque, mute, and concealed. And there is crucial link between democracy and capitalism, for the latter has an insatiable appetite for anything that can be input into its circuits of value production and realization. It is not just that the neoliberals have succeeded in equating democracy with capitalism; there is actually an intimate relationship between the two. The secret, which stands in opposition to both democracy and capital, breaks free from this nexus. Democracy is about learning; communism is about studying.

An attentiveness to and orientation toward the secret, which is always already present within and between us, can help open us up to the event, to the revolutionary rupture within the existing dominant order of things and subjects. The secret is a rearguard, always operating outside of and against democracy and the logic of exchange-value. One question for politics is how we can embrace the secret life and mobilize it as part of a vanguard project against capital. Such an embrace, I suggest, can help us realize not just what we want out of politics, but to where we are and what we have that we want to keep. In the sixth chapter I continue my conversation with Lyotard to offer a method of education, a way of attending to the secret, accommodating alterity, and cultivating receptivity toward the new without abandoning history and materialism; a way of thinking through the relationship between learning and studying. Developing what I call a figural education, I present an educational mode of engagement that has three heterogeneous and synchronous processes: reading, seeing, and blindness. This is a process of opening the world beyond how it appears to us, and of opening ourselves to a world that we can't conceptually understand.

The political question, of course, is how to conduct that negotiation. For pedagogy, the question is: on what criteria does the negotiation process between learning and studying pivot? When and on what basis should repression take place? When should studying itself be suspended? These are questions that haven't been answered by the new communists. Neglecting or refusing to answer these questions can leave education and politics permanently disoriented, a state that is altogether favorable to capitalism and imperialism. We have to develop such criteria, and in the seventh chapter I present some evidence in support of this injunction. I refer to three key battles that have left important marks on the Left: China in 1989, Hungary in 1956, and Libya in 2011. The struggles within each of these countries were presented as "the people" versus "the state," as "rebels" versus a "dictatorship," and the each state's repressive measures were (almost) universally condemned. Indeed, for Agamben the Chinese state's response to the Tiananmen Square protests represents the ultimate assault on whatever singularity. If we actually examine what took place in Tiananmen and elsewhere, however, if we look at the events themselves and-perhaps more importantly-at the social forces involved in the conflicts, then we draw a different conclusion. Although each is obviously unique, I demonstrate that in each instance the state moved to repress not a revolution but a counterrevolution. Such repression wasn't ideal, but that's the whole point: history and reality are never ideal.

This move to history is meant to counter what I call the new orthodoxy of the new communism, an orthodoxy that, in the last instance, frames the discussion. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek make this clear on page two of their introduction to The Idea of Communism: "The left which aligned itself with 'actually existing socialism' has disappeared or turned into a historical curiosity." [28] Dean militates against this by insisting on the continuity of communism as a horizon that has never disappeared and her asserting "communism succeeded." [29] Further, she writes about the necessity of repression and "the bloody violence of revolution." [30] Yet she doesn't engage the historical and existing global communist struggle. There are good philosophical reasons for such abstractions, and politically they prevent the immobilization that can result from debates about particular policies in particular social formations at particular moments in time. Returning to some key moments like I do in this chapter, however, provides nuance to discussions around repression, exclusion, division, and value production, nuance that has interestingly been relatively absent from the new communist discussions. It injects some old communism into the new communism.

Imperialism wears many masks; it transcends space, time, and identity. Its forces and agents are highly organized, centralized, and conscious. How many revolutions have been crushed under the weight of its reaction? How many revolutions have been aborted or turned back by its police, its military, its propaganda, and its agent provocateurs? The ruthlessness and savagery of imperialism renders organization itself a political principle for communists. As such, in the eighth chapter I move to an examination of the Party-form, which I submit is, at base, a pedagogical project. I argue that a foundational task of the Party is to orchestrate the educational process, to navigate the communist pedagogical constellation developed in the book. Revolutions are by definition radically uncertain and unpredictable events. All scripts are thrown out the window as dynamics rapidly shift about. In the midst of this uncertainty, the forces of capital have, historically, been quite well prepared. Without tight, disciplined organization, revolutionary moments result in restoration (a return to before) or counterrevolution. To prepare for revolution, the Party studies the mass movement, learns its lessons, teaches what it doesn't know, and produces us as new, collective subjects. Capital thrives on diversity, complexification, and difference. All sorts of oppositional movements can be coopted, absorbed within the game of profit maximization. When the limits to what capital can accommodate are tested, then repression is unleashed. Studying forges a commonness against that, if organized, can weather that repression, becoming a true political force. The following pages propose a series of educational concepts, frameworks, and modes of engagement that, taken together, form a partisan educational theory: a theory of communist study.

Notes

[1] Louis Althusser, On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses , trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London and New York: Verso, 1995/2014).

[2] Althusser makes this point for the social democrats, who hold that mere technical and legal changes within the capitalist totality will usher in socialism-a critique that is just as important today as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

[3] Thus, the contradiction was between the capitalist and the imperialist camp, the latter of which contained the socialist states and the anti-colonial states that emerged during the socialist and national liberation struggles of the 20th century.

[4] Louis Althusser, On the reproduction of capitalism, 21.

[5] Ibid., 161. In light of just this, it is quite remarkable that the founding theorists of critical pedagogy dismissed Althusser as an economic determinist and as a theorist who strips agency from the subject. See, for example, Henry Giroux, Ideology, culture, and the process of schooling (Philadelphia and London: Temple University Press and Falmer Press, 1981).

[6] For a brilliant and careful argument about this idealism, see Curry Malott, History and education: Engaging the global class war (New York: Peter Lang, 2016).

[7] Peter McLaren, Schooling as ritual performance: Toward a political economy of educational symbols and gestures (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1986/1999), 273-274.

[8] For more on this latter type of interiotiy, see Peter Sloterdijk, The world interior of capital, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005/2013), Spheres I: Bubbles: Microsphereology, trans. Weiland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1998/2011); and Derek R. Ford, "The air conditions of philosophy of education: Toward a microsphereology of the classroom," in In E. Duarte (Ed.), Philosophy of education 2015 (Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society, 2016).

[9] Tyson E. Lewis, "Mapping the constellation of educational Marxism(s)," Educational Philosophy and Theory 44: no. s1: 112.

[10] Ibid., 113.

[11] Curry S. Malott and Derek R. Ford, Marx, capital, and education: Towards a critical pedagogy of becoming (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).

[12] Henry Giroux, On critical pedagogy (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 155.

[13] Georg Lukàcs, History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics , trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1968/1971), 1. Marx's theses, of course, have on the whole only been repeatedly validated.

[14] See, for example, parts I and II of Bertell Ollman, Dialectical investigations (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).

[15] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York and London: Continuum, 1970/2011).

[16] This is one of the primary ways that Gert Biesta distinguishes education from learning. See Gert J.J. Biesta, Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006); and Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2010).

[17] Peter McLaren, Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education , 6th ed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2015), 241.

[18] Ibid.; Capitalists & conquerors: A critical pedagogy against empire (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005); Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the pedagogy of revolution (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000); Pedagogy of insurrection: From resurrection to revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).

[19] Antonia Darder, A dissident voice: Essays on culture, pedagogy, and power (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 207.

[20] Peter McLaren, Life in schools, 196.

[21] Alain Badiou, The communist hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2010); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).

[22] Jodi Dean, The communist horizon (London and New York: Verso, 2012).

[23] Alex J. Means, "Educational commons and the new radical democratic imaginary," Critical Studies in Education 55, no. 2: 132.

[24] This is why Hardt and Negri "smash the state on page 361 only to resurrect it on page 380." David Harvey, Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 152.

[25] Jodi Dean, The communist horizon, 196.

[26] Tyson E. Lewis, On study: Giorgio Agamben and educational potentiality (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 5.

[27] Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1979/1984), xxv.

[28] Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, "Introduction: The idea of communism," in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (Eds), The idea of communism (London and New York: Verso, 2010), viii.

[29] Jodi Dean, The communist horizon, 58.

[30] Ibid.

Don't Bring the Truth to a Knife Fight: A New Year's Proposal for the Left

By Derek R. Ford

The following is an excerpt from the author's new book, Politics and pedagogy in the "post-truth" era.

Many are in shock that today that the truth doesn't seem to matter in politics. Every time U.S. president Donald Trump tweets out that a news article unfavorable to him is "FAKE NEWS!" they are aghast and disoriented. Every time he says something blatantly false, it adds a new bullet point to a list of lies and sets off a new circuit of outrage. The response is clear: we need to call out the lies and tell the truth! Educators have a crucial role to play here, for we are the ones who teach the truth to others, or who facilitate the collective realization of the truth. This analysis and proposal completely miss the mark: politics has never been about a correspondence with an existing truth. Indeed, when I hear people denounce our political scene as "post-truth," I have to wonder when exactly they think it was that politics was determined by the truth? The same goes for those who decry today's "fake news." Hasn't the media always been an arena of struggle? To claim that with Trump's election we've entered a post-truth era of fake news is to claim that the U.S. was built on truthful politics and media. Political struggle isn't really about an existing truth but rather concerns the formulation of new truths and, more importantly, the materialization of those truths. Our contemporary moment thus offers up an important opportunity for the Left to embrace political struggle, to stake out positions, and to fight to make those positions reality.

On the one hand, it seems reasonable to propose that we reject the "post-truth" designation altogether. After all, doesn't the repetition of that language serve to further entrench the liberal narrative of a democracy corrupted? I would answer this question affirmatively. But, on the other hand, we can't exhaustively determine the uses to which this language will be put and the effects that such usage will have, and maybe there's an opening here. Thus, I'd like to hang on to the "post-truth" for now, but I'd like to propose a particular conceptualization of it, one that I believe holds political and pedagogical promise as a frame for engaging in transformative praxis. To be post-truth, so I wish to suggest, is not to be "anti-truth" or even "without truth." Instead, I proffer that we understand the relationship between the "post-truth" and "the truth" in the same way that Jean-François Lyotard formulated the relationship between the modern and the postmodern.

For Lyotard, the postmodern is not a negation, annihilation, or supersession of the modern. There is no dialectic of or between either. The postmodern doesn't come after the modern, for such a progression would itself be decidedly modern. No, the postmodern "is undoubtedly part of the modern," Lyotard tells us. [1] Even Christianity has its own postmodern inflection (for who can really prove that Christ isn't a phony?)[2] The postmodern inhabits the modern, interrupting it: "The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations- not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable ."[3] The modern is that which offers up a narrative of understanding, cohesion, and unity, and the postmodern is that which interrupts it.

The post-truth designation, on this reading, might be an occasion to refuse the liberal nostalgia for the democratic and civil public sphere based on truthful exchange at the marketplace of ideas. Like the postmodern shows how the modern covers over difference and the rules and methods by which difference is accommodated or obliterated, the post-truth can agitate the political nature of truth and, more importantly, the pedagogy of truth. The post-truth, in other words, opens up a political project as well as a pedagogical one. The political project involves the power relations that compose truths, and the pedagogical project involves how we engage ourselves, each other, and the world in transformative processes.

Force in the market-place of ideas

The right wing knows all of this. They don't make appeals to the truth. They make appeals to beliefs and convictions. If those beliefs and desires contradict some set of evidence, then that evidence is fake. That is what Donald Trump means when he tweets "FAKE NEWS!" It isn't an assertion of what the truth really is (as if the news had some innate relationship to truth and constituted "the real"). It isn't an objection based on an understanding of language as neutral and objective containers of ideas, nor is it based on an understanding of language as a weapon of persuasion. Rather, the "FAKE NEWS" tweet is intended as an anticipatory interpellation. It's an assertion of belief of what should be, a performative utterance meant to organize and intensify one side-his side-of the political. To reply that the news isn't fake, that the fake news designation only applies to news that he doesn't like, news that makes his side look bad, misses the point completely. Sure, the right wing preaches about the importance of "freedom of speech," but they clearly only mean their speech. They'll attack a left-wing academic for their tweets and try to get them fired while they protest against a campus banning a neo-Nazi speaker. Recently, Trump got backlash for sharing anti-Islamic propaganda videos from a neo-Nazi group in Britain. Their veracity was first called into question and then disproven. When confronted with this, Trump's press secretary totally disregarded the attack: "Whether it's a real video, the threat is real," she said. [4]

This is why the right wing is winning: they know they have enemies and they have allies, and together they want to defeat those enemies. To defeat those enemies, they mobilize, organize, intervene, and act collectively. They imagine the future they want. They talk to each other, they create their own ideological bubbles from which to act, resist, take swings. They capture the state and wield it toward their ends. They don't care about what the other side thinks. They aren't trying to win us over. They believe in themselves and their movement. They don't think their people need to be enlightened by public intellectuals.

This isn't an embrace of relativism. I'm not saying that what is true for some is false for others or that we should never make appeals to the truth. But we can't position politics outside of the truth or pretend that our politics is derived from the truth. The truth is always framed and contextualized, and so we need to ask what certain truths are doing in certain moments, what their material effects will be. Think about what's happening in Iran right now. There are anti-government protests. There are pro-government protests. It is "people" who are at each of the protests. I can share pictures of either sets of protests, and say "support the people!" Politics is much more helpful than the truth.

None of this is to say that appeals to the truth aren't important, for they surely are. It is important to call out the lies propagated by the right wing to promote oppression and exploitation. My point is that this is a failed political strategy because it rests on the idea that there is a truth that can bridge all divisions and erase all antagonisms, something we can all agree on that transcends our structural positions in society.

I'm also not arguing that "might makes right." If I was, then I would be affirming that what is should be. My position rather is that might makes; that it is ultimately force which makes our world, not abstract ideals or transcendent truths. In his study of public space and social justice, Don Mitchell shows how "the public" is never decided a priori but is always the result of concerted action on behalf of the excluded. Certain groups, that is, only become part of the public to the extent to which they force a new configuration of the public. One of the ways Mitchell demonstrates this is by looking at the history of speech regulations in the U.S. One common thread throughout Supreme Court rulings on protests and "free speech" is the idea that "a democratic polity requires dissenting ideas; these ideas, however, have to stand or fall on their own merits as they enter into competition with other ideas; the better ideas win, but only by being tested against less worthy ideas." [5]

This is where we get to the "marketplace of ideas," which only works if we accept the market for what it actually is. Bourgeois ideologues (on the Supreme Court and everywhere) want us to think of the marketplace of ideas like they want us to think about any marketplace: a space in which different groups hang commodities with price tags and descriptions for buyers to peruse at their leisure until they decide on the one or ones they'd like to purchase. Setting aside the characterization of ideas as commodities, this is liberal ideology at its purest in that it completely ignores power, ownership, subjectivity, and history. First there is the question of who has admittance to the marketplace to buy and sell, as marketplaces are always exclusionary. Even in so-called free societies there are a host of racialized, gendered, and classed rules (e.g., dress codes, age limits) and the construction of some as "window shoppers" and others as "loiterers." Second, even if everyone was allowed to participate in the marketplace, some clearly have more capital than others and therefore can purchase preferential locations with bigger lots, recruit and fund designers, advertisers, hawks, and so on, to sell their products. They can buy out their competitors, create legislative barriers to entry, establish monopolies.

There is an even more fundamental problem with the marketplace of ideas, which is the question of determining what constitutes the competitive order in the first place, and the rules of engagement in the second place. The excluded are by definition irrational, disorderly, and without access to the marketplace. And so, as a result of struggle, Mitchell says, "the seeming irrationality of violence… becomes a rational means for redressing the irrationality of injustice, for withdrawing consent from an order that does not deserve to be legitimated." [6] The marketplace is not a site of idyllic exchange but of coercion, power, and struggle, and the capitalist marketplace was founded on slavery, genocide, and the expropriation of many by law and individual acts of terror. If this order is to be transformed then there must be a forceful disorder. The direction of that disorder will determine the character of the political thrust, but regardless of its character, without force there is no transformation. As Marx put it, "force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with the new."[7]

Derek R. Ford is an academic, organizer, and member of the Hampton Institute. His most recent book is Education and the production of space: Political pedagogy, geography, and urban revolution (Routledge, 2017).

Notes

[1] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. D. Barry, B. Maher, J. Pefanis, V. Spate, and M. Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988/1992), 12.

[2] Ibid., chapter 2. Here Lyotard clarifies his infamous report on knowledge and postmodernity, writing that he both oversimplified and overemphasized the category of the narrative.

[3] Ibid., 15, emphasis added.

[4] Christina Wilkie, (2017). "White House: It Doesn't Matter if Anti-Muslim Videos Are Real Because 'the Threat is Real." CNBC, 29 November. Available online: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/white-house-it-doesnt-matter-if-anti-muslim-videos-are-real-the-threat-is-real.html (accessed 30 November 2017).

[5] Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003), 47.

[6] Don Mitchell, The Right to the City, 53.

[7] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (vol. 1), trans. S. Moore (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 703.

The Pedagogy of Hip Hop: Underground Soundtracks for Dissecting and Confronting the Power Structure

By Colin Jenkins

Disclaimer: The language expressed in this article is an uncensored reflection of the views of the artists as they so chose to speak and express themselves. Censoring their words would do injustice to the freedom of expression and political content this article intends to explore. Therefore, some of the language appearing below may be offensive to personal, cultural, or political sensibilities.

On the 16th track of Immortal Technique's Revolutionary, Volume 2, Mumia Abu-Jamal theorizes on the inherent contradictions between the lived reality of many Americans and the notion of homeland [in]security. In doing so, he explains how the musical phenomenon of hip hop captures these contradictions by displaying "gritty roots" that are bound up in systemic injustice and deep feelings of fear and hatred. These feelings, according to Mumia, engulf entire generations of children who have been betrayed by systems of capitalism and white supremacy, and their intricately constructed school-to-prison pipeline:

"To think about the origins of hip hop in this culture, and also about homeland security, is to see that there are at the very least two worlds in America. One of the well-to-do and another of the struggling. For if ever there was the absence of homeland security, it is seen in the gritty roots of hip hop. For the music arises from a generation that feels, with some justice, that they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated, and unloved. And this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry. One senses very little hope above the personal goals of wealth to climb above the pit of poverty. In the broader society, the opposite is true. For here, more than any other place on earth, wealth is more widespread and so bountiful, that what passes for the middle class in America could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world. Their very opulent and relative wealth makes them insecure. And homeland security is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoronic, as crazy as saying military intelligence, or the U.S Department of Justice. They're just words that have very little relationship to reality. And do you feel safer now? Do you think you will anytime soon? Do you think duct tape and Kleenex and color codes will make you safe?"

In his short commentary, Mumia refers specifically to the Black community in the US - a community that has been ravaged from every angle through America's relatively short history: two and a half centuries of chattel slavery followed by various forms of legalized systems of servitude and second-class citizenship, including sharecropping , convict leasing , Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. A history consumed with betrayal after betrayal, complex layers of institutional racism carried out under the guise of legality, and a systematic ghettoization supported by both " white flight" and widespread discriminatory housing and employment practices. Mumia juxtaposes this unique experience to the "broader society," one that is riddled with insecurities stemming from "opulent and relative" wealth, to expose the irony of "homeland security," a term that he views as oxymoronic.

Mumia is correct in characterizing the reactionary temperament of both the American middle and upper classes - sects that both determine and maintain dominant culture. Broader society is molded by this temperament, which is buoyed by small pockets of socioeconomic comfort floating in a vast sea of instability that not only plagues the Black community in its never-ending struggle against both white supremacy and capitalism, but also poor and working-class white communities that have been similarly doomed by their forced reliance on wage labor. Despite what he describes as "bountiful wealth," American society has always been propped up on this hidden base of despair, felt by a majority of the population that exists below the façade. Since the 1980s, this façade has been slowly chiseled away as neoliberalism has successfully funneled wealth to the few at the top while creating a race to the bottom for everyone else, including those once deemed "middle class."

This race to the bottom has exposed the underbelly of instability through its attack on a fast-eroding, mostly-white middle class that now finds itself desperately seeking reasons for its newfound despair. While those of us at the bottom may welcome the company, in hopes that it will bring the critical mass needed to finally confront and bring down the capitalist system, it also signals trying times ahead. In being consistent with similar erosions of "relative and bountiful wealth" throughout history, the American demise brings with it a fairly high probability of a fascist tide. In fact, this tide has already begun to form, largely through millions of white tears dropping from the Tea Party, its Reaganite forerunners, the "alt-right," a surge of neo-Nazism and white nationalism, and Donald Trump's pied piper-like rhetoric that has pooled it all together.

While middle-class America comes crashing down along with the empire, the Black community remains steadfast in its centuries-long defensive posture. Despite facing an acute, structural oppression that is unparalleled in any other modern "industrialized" setting, and in spite of Mumia's sobering analysis, the Black community has in many ways survived and thrived like no other. This survival in the face of intense hatred has been expressed through many musical forms , from the early roots of rock n roll, Blues, and American Jazz to the hip-hop phenomenon that Mumia speaks of. This collective survival is perfectly captured in Tupac's poem,The Rose that Grew from Concrete, which tells the story of

…the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete
Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned how to walk without havin feet
Funny it seems but by keepin its dreams
It learned to breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
When no one else even cared.

In explaining the meaning of the poem, Pac summed up much of the African-American experience, as well as the reactionary temperament often directed at it from those in more privileged positions:

"You try to plant somethin in the concrete. If it grows, and the rose petal got all kind of scratches and marks, you not gonna say, "Damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from concrete." You gonna be like, "Damn! A rose grew from the concrete?!" Same thing with me… I grew out of all of this. Instead of sayin, "Damn, he did this, he did this," just be like, "Damn! He grew out of that? He came out of that?" That's what they should say… All the trouble to survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle they gave me. I'm just tryin to make somethin."

Pac's story also describes that of the entire American working class, as a collection of former slaves, indentured servants, peasants, and poor immigrants set up for failure by a capitalist system designed to exploit us all, collectively. The working-class struggle is tightly intertwined with the Black struggle. The Communist Party knew this long ago. The Industrial Workers of the World did as well. The original Black Panther Party also knew this, as did all those coming from the Black Radical Tradition in America: W.E.B. DuBois, the African Blood Brotherhood, Harry Haywood, the Revolutionary Action Movement, Frances M. Beal, Angela Davis, C.L.R. James, the Combahee River Collective, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Congress of African People, and so many others.

As this struggle commences and intensifies during what appear to be the end days of American Empire, underground hip hop provides us with a soundtrack that is laced with historical context, deep analysis, and valuable knowledge - all of which should be applied while moving forward. The "psychic fuel" that Mumia points to in his brief commentary, which "generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry" is far from misguided, and extends far beyond cathartic release. While in the mainstream, the Black Radical Tradition continues to be tragically mocked by identity politics , activist-celebrity tweeters pimping corporate brands , black liberation-themed credit cards , high-dollar-plate events, non-profit organizations, and the Democratic Party, its torch remains lit through the lyrics burning on underground hip-hop tracks. And this underground reflects the pulse of the streets, where tens of millions experience daily life in the underbelly of instability - not on Twitter, Facebook, or fundraising dinners at the Marriott.

Structural Oppression Under Capitalism

As resistance movements gain momentum in the days of Trump, an understanding of the disastrous effects of capitalism is necessary. Party politics are, as John Dewey once explained, the "shadow cast on society by big business (capitalism)." Politicians from both parties work within this shadow, delivering rhetoric to the masses before and after taking orders from their donors, sponsors, and corporate overlords. Regardless of who is in the highest office, whether it's an eloquent black President or a blustering billionaire, "the attenuation does not change the substance." As a popular Internet meme recently noted, the 'hood under Trump is the same as the 'hood under Obama, which was the same as the 'hood under Bush, which was the same as the 'hood under Clinton. Sadly, this sentiment could go on for as long as Presidents have occupied the white house. Politicians and presidents come and go, and nothing changes for most of us; because, quite frankly, it is not supposed to. Politics serve capitalism; and capitalism does not serve us.

"It's like an open-air prison and it remained packed"

Hip hop serves as historiography in this sense, documenting the conditions of neighborhoods throughout the US for the past four decades, examining the histories behind multi-generational poverty, and seeking ways to address the dire situations many find themselves in. Ironically, the rise of hip hop paralleled the rise of the neoliberal era, a period that has been marked by an intensification of the capitalist system. During this time, things for most have at best remained stagnant, and at worst become increasingly disastrous. The hook in Erykah Badu's The Cell (2008) captures this lived experience in sobering fashion:

We're not well
We're not well
We can't tell

Brenda done died with no name
Nickel bag coke to the brain
Will they ever find the vaccine?
Shitty-damn-damn-baby-bang
Rich man got the double barrel
Po' man got his back to the door
Code white stands for trouble
Shots from the po-po (blah blah)

Jean Grae's Block Party , the 4th track on her 2002 album Attack of the Attacking Things, provides an intimate glimpse into the state of Black communities during this time:

I don't wanna preach or come off bitter, this is a commentary auditory
Editorial, about the state of things, state of mind and state of being
What the fuck is goin on? How the fuck we gonna make it out?
It's hectic, from asbestos filled classrooms
To the stench of death that's still in New York
The air is thick with it, but it reaches further
Like the world murder rate

While illustrating the chronic conditions found in many communities, Grae immediately offers insight into possible solutions rooted in consciousness. Without actually saying it, her lyrics brilliantly dip into a structural analysis that calls for abandoning capitalist culture and realizing the tragic ironies in seeking individual materialistic goals. In doing so, there is an underlying theme to escape values that have been implanted into not only predominantly Black communities, but also working-class communities as a whole:

We need to globalize, further spread on this earth
To appreciate the full value of individual worth
To realize how ridiculous the thought of ownership is
And protectin your turf - that's bullshit man
That's how we got colonized
Missionaries create foreign schools and change the native way & thinkin
So in ten years, we can have a foreign Columbine
In some small village in the Amazon, c'mon man

Grae's second verse masterfully ties together a narrative based in seeking a collective consciousness while avoiding a house-slave mentality that aims to, as she puts it, "chill with rich white folks." Again, while directed toward members of the Black community, Grae's commentary is undeniably relative to the working-class struggle in its entirety, especially in terms of how the "rags-to-riches," so-called "American Dream" is framed strictly within individual pursuits of wealth and hyper-consumerism. Ultimately, as Grae suggests, this mentality must be shed through deeper calls for knowledge, community, and shared struggle:

It's every man for himself
That's why the black community is lackin in wealth, there's no unity
We soon to be chillin with rich white folk
And that means that we made it
Let our kids go hungry before our wardrobe is outdated

…If the system's corrupt, then change it
Fought for the right to vote, don't even use it
Forget electoral winnin
The way the world's goin, we in the ninth inning
Heh, and we still aren't up to bat
Niggas is happy just to have the rights to sit on the bench
Like floor seats is alright, and that's as far as we reach
Materialistic values, not morals, that's what we teach
I see it in the youth, hungry for fame and money
Not for knowledge and pursuit of the truth
Pick up a book or a newspaper
Take a free class in politics or human behavior

Talib Kweli and Rapsody's Every Ghetto , the 2nd track on Kweli's 2015 album Indie 500, echoes Grae's track in addressing the systematic ghettoization of the Black community under the intertwined tandem of capitalism and white supremacy. Crucially, the track challenges the often-mistaken attempt to characterize ghetto life as a monolithic existence, seemingly warning against the fetishization of the black struggle while reflecting Pac's poem of the concrete rose and highlighting the unique struggle and persistence of the Black working class. Kweli's bridge builds on Grae's Block Party narrative, celebrating the communal potential of struggling communities:

I'm good walkin' in every ghetto around the world
The hood often embrace ya when you profound with words
I say the shit they relate to, I keep it down to Earth
Other rappers sound like they hate you, them niggas sound absurd
So when they walk through the ghetto they get their chain snatched
They gotta talk to the ghetto to get their chain back
It's like an open-air prison and it remain packed
Nothin' but straight facts

Kweli's initial verse jumps directly into a layered analysis, with the first bar alone touching on chronic malnourishment, poor education, smothering crime, gentrification, and a culture of anti-consciousness:

Every ghetto, every city, like Ms. Hill
They way too used to the missed meals
Hard to concentrate, hard to sit still
Murder rate permanent place in the top 10
We live here, these hipsters drop in
You hear them barrels cockin'
They say consciousness mean a nigga ain't rugged
Until they get beat within an inch of it

Rapsody closes the track with a powerful verse, filled with structural and cultural critiques all tied to capitalism and white supremacy. Her verse is laced with innuendo in a masterful play on words as she illustrates the lived reality of generations of Black Americans who have been systematically targeted by America's settler-colonial project, pointing to everything from police terror and the destruction of the Black family unit to the false promises of individualized pursuits of wealth.

Indie 5, for the people by the people
Ya-ya, giddy up, who got the juice now?
Snatch it out your kiddies cups
The shit you gave us watered down
This one's for Basquiat
They be brushin' with death, uh
Is this The Art Of War for cops?
We double-dutchin' duckin' shots
Every home ain't got a Pops
Every man ain't sellin' rocks
A different will to win here
Different from switchin' cars
They pray that we switch our bars
To a fiend from a metaphor
Worldstar, Worldstar
Lotta love and this life hard
Keep us prayin' like "oh God"
Illegally thievery think us peelin' off easily
Frustrated we hate it
That's why we scream out "nigga we made it"
It's an odd future they ain't know we was all some creators
Somethin' from nothin' was told Kings walk and man you frontin'
For the people and by the people but them over money
I'm on my Viola Davis here, workin' for justice
How you get away with murder? Be a cop and just kill us
How we supposed to not catch feelings?
Innocent lives, boy we got kids in these buildings
I'm on my Viola Davis, it's what you call a defense
For all the drama they gave us I'm spittin' Shonda Rhimes wit
Too high for you like ganja, that's what Shonda rhyme with
I holla back in the Hamptons, you still black if you rich
Spread love ain't just the Brooklyn way, it's universal
360 and the nine lives, whoa, what a circle

"Keep it movin' on"

While systemic oppression has plagued many generations of working-class Americans, especially non-white (as noted by Grae, Kweli and Rapsody), the middle class has only begun to feel the pressure of the capitalist system. The American middle class is an anomaly in history. Its formation defied the internal mechanics of capitalism, a system that is designed to favor the privileged few who have access to enough capital to own the means of production. This anomaly was beneficial for America's capitalist class, in that it allowed for a slick rebranding of capitalism as a system of "freedom" and "liberty." For decades, the American middle class was held up as the ultimate advertisement for a system that we were told allowed for social mobility through "hard work." These fables became so strong that an entire century was spent trying to shape a benevolent form of capitalism through government intervention (Keynesianism) and a robust Welfare State. Because of its relative success, mainly due to US imperial endeavors abroad, the capitalist system was not only propped up, but it was even sold to the masses as "the only alternative." The era of neoliberalism ended all of that. As capitalism's internal mechanics were unleashed during this period, so too were its natural consequences - capital accumulation for the elites, and mass dispossession for the people.

While mainstream media outlets continue to push a tired narrative, hip hop has shed some light on the real effects of capitalism. Vinnie Paz's 2010 track Keep Movin' On provides insight into these effects, and especially how they relate to the American worker. The first verse informs us in two ways. First, Paz illustrates the workers' role in the capitalist system, which is merely to serve as a tool to be used and exploited until no longer needed. In this role, we are not considered as human beings with families, needs, and inherent rights; we are only valuable as long as we provide owners with an avenue of extracting surplus labor from us for their profit. Second, the verse specifically describes the plight of the American manufacturing worker and the demise of middle-class jobs over the past 40 years due to globalization, corporate offshoring, and free trade agreements - all elements of the proliferation of capitalism in the neoliberal era:

I lost my job at the factory and that's disastrous
They said it's due to regulation and higher taxes
They ain't give me no notice. They knocked me off my axis
I can't pay the electric bill. It's total blackness
I suggested some incentives for innovation
But that was met with resistance like it's a sin of Satan
I'm losing my patience over here. I'm sick of waiting
And I ain't never expect to be in this situation
And the manufacturing jobs are fading fast (Damn)
Can't do nothing else. I should've stayed in class
I have to wait till summertime to cut the blades of grass
I have this little bit of money. Have to make it last
I have children to feed. I have a loving wife
I had a hard time coming that was nothing nice
I keep asking myself what am I doing wrong
And they just look at me and tell me "Keep it movin' on"

"Kill my landlord"

Along with massive unemployment and underemployment, the working class is also constantly faced with insecure housing situations. Landlordism is a natural byproduct of a capitalist system which seeks to commodify basic human needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare for profit. Under this system, the few who can afford to own multiple properties are allowed to exploit the many who can barely afford basic shelter for themselves and their families. Because of this, many of us go our entire lives without ever establishing a stable home environment.

As of 2017, this natural housing crisis has reached a point where it's being labeled an epidemic even by mainstream sources. As rent continues to soar , so do evictions. " As of 2015 , more than 20 million renters-more than half of all renters in the U.S.-were cost burdened, meaning they spent at least at least 30 percent of their income on rent. That's up from almost 15 million in 2001. And while rents have risen 66 percent since 2000, household incomes have only risen 35 percent." In 2015, an estimated 2.7 million Americans faced eviction. Median rent has increased by more than 70% since 1995, while wages have stagnated for almost 30 years, and jobs that pay a living wage have disappeared during this same period. Landlords will go to great lengths to throw families and children out in the streets, sometimes even for falling behind one month on rent. "A landlord can evict tenants through a formal court process," explains Matthew Desmond , "or they can choose cheaper and quicker ways" to boot the families, such as "paying them a couple of hundred dollars to vacate by the end of the week" or even by removing the front door of the home. In order to protect this for-profit housing system from total collapse, the federal government uses numerous programs to assist people, including public housing, rental assistance, and even massive tax subsidies for homeowners. Despite this, many families are cold-heartedly exploited and discarded by landlords who want nothing more than to profit off this forced, human desperation. After living such an existence, The Coup's 1993 track Kill My Landlord , which featured the less-known rap duo Elements of Change, is surely to serve as a long-standing anthem for many:

Overlord of the concrete jungle but I'm humble
As I witness my opponent crumble
Like the shack that I live in the house that I rent from him
Roach infested I'm sure that the rats are nesting
The heat doesn't work he still hasn't checked it
Disrespected me for the last time
I loaded up the nine stepping double time
Bullseye, Another point scored
Right between the eyes of my landlord

All who have relied on rental property to live can certainly relate to the undignified relationship between landlord and tenant. Like bosses, landlords exploit us as resources. And the capitalist system not only allows them the power to do this on mass scale, it actually supports their rights with force if necessary. Our collective desperation is their individual gain. And our forced dependency on them leaves us with no leverage against their power. The second verse of The Coup's classic track reflects on this slave-like existence brought on by capitalism and landlordism:

So me I'm chilling at the table with my family
Hypothetically trying hard to keep my mind off the economy
Yeah I know the reason I find it hard to pass the test
Call me a victim cause I'm another brother jobless
Every day it seems like I'm moving closer to the streets
PG&E repo'ed the lights and my fucking heat
The situation's getting hard for me to handle
Had to trade my Nike's to the store to buy some candles
Last to first and I'm a-hunted and a ho I know
The man is going to come and throw me in the cold
Tears in my eye as I'm thinking of place to stay
While I'm staring at the freebie cheese up in my plate
I heard a bang bang bang knocking at my door
I looked up it was my motherfucking landlord, let him in quick
Followed by the sheriff deputy trying to come in
Every po on my property, staring me down
Mugging hard up in my family's face
While they're sitting at the table trying to say grace
But before I make this one my last meal
Any moves, yeah I'm looking for the damn kill
I said it twice in case he didn't hear me though
Sucker made a move evidently when he hit the floor
So now I'm in cuffs for the crimes I've committed
Maybe I'll go to jail, heh, or maybe I'll get acquitted
But the fact still stands I killed my landlord dead
Now I've got three meals and a roof over my head

In the third verse, Boots Riley connects the inherent injustices of landlordism to not only capitalism, but also to European conquest and the process of primitive accumulation that allowed settler-colonists to create wealth from the Atlantic Slave Trade and Indigenous holocaust. There is an overt racial component to this process, as descendants of former slaves are still forced to depend on descendants of former slave-owners for basic needs. Recognizing the injustices and illegitimacy of this system, and seeking revolutionary change, is crucial. Boots delivers knowledge:

Cash is made in lump sums as street bums eat crumbs
So I defeat scum as I beat drums
Rum-tiddy-tum like the little drummer boy song
Here comes the landlord at the door, ding dong
Is it wrong that my momma sticks a fat-ass thong
Up his anal cavity cause he causes gravity to my family
Says we gotta pay a fee so we can stay and eat
In a house with light and heat
The bastard could get beat, stole the land from Chief Littlefeet
House is built on deceit, got no rent receipt
So I'm living in the street and I'm down now
Don't you know to not fuck with the Mau Mau?
Notice of eviction, four knuckle dental affliction
Friction, oh did I mention
You'll be finger licking as I handicap your diction
And you say you're not a criminal like Tricky Dick Nixon?
While we're fixing to impose rent control
We didn't vote on it, this land wasn't bought or sold
It was stole by your great granddaddy's ganking
Osagyefo said they call it primitive accumulation
Plantations, TV stations wealth is very stationary
I learned the game and I became a revolutionary
Scaring the corporate asses cause the masses are a loaded gun
Killing the world banking and international monetary fund
I'm done, we're done with what you've done
For twenty-five score we've got a battle cry
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my landlord

While representing a main staple of capitalism, landlordism also mimics the dynamics of settler societies in that settlers gain a disproportionate amount of land ownership at the expense of the mass dispossession of native populations. In many ways, modern landlords in the US represent the traditional colonizer, often buying up property in "foreign" communities for the sole purpose of exploiting masses of renters through dispossession and forced reliance. As in the process of gentrification, landlords dispossess thousands of poor and working-class people in their never-ending pursuit for more and more property to commodify. E-Roc finishes the track strong, calling on a figurative Mau Mau rebellion to "kill" the modern version of colonizers.

I need six hundred dollars by the end of the week
My body is cold, dirty socks on my feet
Not a black sheep, but who's the creep
Trying to put me on the street while I'm trying to sleep?
I wanna kill my landlord, murder in the first degree
If there's something wrong he wants to blame me
Wants to be a threat so he carries a gun
Well I pack a 9 cause I can't trust 911
Son of a gun, I'm the one who cuts the grass
Wash the windows and he still wants me to kiss his ass
But I laugh cause America's not my home
My landlord took me away from where I belong
But it's a sad song so I face reality now
Pick up the phone and now here comes the Mau Mau
To the rescue, down with The Coup
Yo landlord, I've got a little message for you
I'm going cuckoo, fuck a machete or sword
E-Roc is on a mission to kill my landlord

How the Capitalist/Imperialist War Machine Works Against Us

On Track 7 of Immortal Technique's 2005 Bin Laden remix album, Mumia Abu-Jamal once again spits knowledge, this time providing brilliantly poetic commentary framing capitalism and imperialism as " a war versus us all ":

The war against us all
This war in Iraq isn't the end; it's the beginning of Wars to come
All around the world at the whim of the Neo-Cons in the White House
This is the Bush Doctrine come to life; War, war and more war!
War brought to you by the big corporate-masters who run the show
This isn't just a War on Iraqis or Afghanis or Arabs, or even Muslims
It is ultimately a War on us all.
That's because the billions and billions that are being spent on this War
The cost of tanks, rocketry, bullets and yes even salaries
For the 125, 000 plus troops, is money that will never be spent on;
Education, on healthcare, on the reconstruction of crumbling public housing
Or to train and place the millions of workers
Who have lost manufacturing jobs in the past three years alone
The War in Iraq is in reality; a war against the nations' workers and the poor
Who are getting less and less
While the big Defense industries and making a killing, literally.
What's next Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela?
We've already seen the corporate media
Play megaphone to the White House, to build and promote a War based on lies
War is utilized by the imperialists first and foremost, to crush internal enemies
We're seeing the truth of its insight
When we see the sad state of American education
The rush of seniors to buy affordable medications from the Canadians
Because American drugs are just too expensive
The threat of privatization of Social Security
And the wave of repression that comes with an increasing Militarized Police;
This is a War on all of us
And the struggle against War is really a struggle for a better life
For the millions of folks who are in need here in this country!
The fight against the War is really to fight for your own interest
Not the false interests of the Defense Industry
Or the corporate media or the White House
Down with the Wars for empire.

Immortal Technique's subsequent track, Bin Laden , is a masterful critique of US imperialism and the corollary effects of government control on American citizens. Written during the W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, the track touches on the fear-mongering that led to the Patriot Act, the hypocrisy of American politicians, and the CIA's dealings in the Middle East during the 1980s, which created and strengthened groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Tech begins by contrasting the lived realities of most American citizens with the artificial realities disseminated from the power structure and its calls for blind patriotic loyalty:

I pledge no allegiance, fuck the President's speeches!
I'm baptized by America and covered in leeches.
The dirty water that bleaches your soul, and your facial features.
Drowning you in propaganda that they spit through the speakers.
And if you speak about the evil that the government does.
The Patriot Act will track you to the type of your blood.
They try to frame you and say you was trying sell drugs.
And throw a federal indictment on niggas to show you love.
This shit is run by fake Christians, fake politicians.
Look at they mansions, then look at the conditions you live in.

He wraps up the first verse by summarizing US foreign policy during the 1980s, specifically referring to the substantial financial and military aid provided to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during their prolonged war against the Soviet Union. During this time, Osama Bin Laden was a US ally who was a beneficiary of much of this aid, as was Saddam.

All they talk about is terrorism on television.
They tell you to listen.
But they don't really tell you they mission.
They funded al-Qaeda.
And now they blame the Muslim religion.
Even though Bin Laden was a CIA tactician.
They gave him billions of dollars and they funded his purpose.
Fahrenheit 9/11? That's just scratching the surface!

…And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons.
We sold him that shit after Ronald Reagan's election.
Mercenary contractors fighting in a new era
Corporate military banking off the war on terror.

The fact that the US government once supported and funded Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein is not the main point in Tech's lyrical thesis, but rather the context that leads us into deeper analysis on US foreign policy, the military industrial complex, and the rise of Islamophobia and the War on Terror. By showing how loyalties easily sway, Tech is showing us how the purpose of US interventions abroad are not really about "protecting freedom" or "defending us." Rather, US foreign policy is a chess game played by the capitalist ruling class for the purpose of engineering and maintaining the US Empire , which in essence is serving as the forerunner and protector of the global capitalist system. So-called terrorism and "Muslim extremism" are nothing more than a manufactured fears designed to scare a sizable portion of the American public into supporting these destructive efforts abroad. Samuel Huntington's 1996 book Clash of Civilizations is often looked to as the main driver in this farce of a cultural/religious global war. In supporting Tech's message, Noam Chomsky talks about the obvious contradictions of Huntington's thesis here , as Edward Said further discredits it here . A simple search of stock reports for major weapons manufacturers over the past decade shows how profitable the "war on terror" has been. Understanding geopolitics is often as easy as following the money.

Part of Tech's second verse includes a brilliant critique of state nationalism and patriotism, illustrating how and why government and capitalist interests are not the same as the peoples' interests, despite being advertised as such. While these wars spread and intensify, most of us continue to struggle.

They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that's bullshit, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
'Cause if another country invaded the hood tonight
It'd be warfare through Harlem and Washington Heights
I wouldn't be fighting for Bush or White America's dream
I'd be fighting for my people's survival and self-esteem
I wouldn't fight for racist churches from the South, my nigga
I'd be fighting to keep the occupation out, my nigga

…. 'Cause innocent people get murdered in the struggle daily
And poor people never get shit and struggle daily

In a remixed version of this track that includes hip-hop vets Chuck D and KRS-One, Tech tweaks the lyrics to this verse in order to show how the "clash of religions" narrative, as highlighted by Chomsky and Said, is falsely perpetrated:

They say that terrorism revolves around the Qur'an
But that's stupid, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
Cause if this country was invaded and crumbled
I'd turn Harlem into a Columbian jungle
And I wouldn't be fighting for a Christian nation
I'd be fighting for survival from extermination
I wouldn't fight for Fox News, them racist niggas
I'd be fighting for the hood, for the faceless niggas

Tech also addresses the hypocrisy of America's fundamentalist Christian sect, which strongly supports the Republican Party, the clash of civilizations/religion narrative, the Israeli Apartheid state, and military interventions abroad. Christian fundamentalism in the US plays an important role as a conduit to white supremacy and class warfare, as seen in its common stance against the interests of both the Black community and the immigrant community, as well as the poor and working-class communities altogether. This conduit has shown itself in the Republican Party's four-decade-long Southern Strategy and the rise of Donald Trump's presidency, which has brought with it overt elements of white supremacy, or as Tech puts it, "devils that run America like 'Birth of a Nation,' a popular white-supremacist propaganda film from 1915:

Government front religious, but their heart is empty
Like a televangelist preaching out of his Bentley
Calling abortion murder in a medical building
But don't give a fuck about bombing Iraqi children
Talking like units in the fucking libretto
Look at their mansions and look at your suburban ghetto
The gulag, the new hood where they send us to live
Cause they don't give a fuck about none of our kids
That's why Blacks and Latinos get the worst education
While devils run America like "Birth of a Nation"
Affirmative action ain't reverse discrimination
That shit is a pathetic excuse for reparations

Fake News, Structural Misinformation, and How the Ruling Class Control Politics

The notion of "fake news" has become a prominent theme in American politics due to Donald Trump's constant use of the term to explain what he views as his unfair treatment and misinterpretation by some media outlets. Ironically, the term is also being used by liberal opponents of Trump to claim that Russia had influenced the Presidential election in Trump's favor. The Washington Post even went as far as publishing a report citing "anonymous groups" to list dozens of online news sources that allegedly served as "instruments of Russian propaganda" during the 2016 Presidential race. Despite some backpedaling on the initial article (to include an editor's note and the removal of some websites from the list), liberal-leaning media outlets like the Washington Post and MSNBC have persisted with this seemingly hysterical and bizarre Russophobic angle to attempt to discredit Trump's presidency. As if Trump's personal history, business dealings, fascist rhetoric, narcissism, constant lies, and hyper-capitalist policy platform are not bad enough.

There are some very interesting points to take from this liberal narrative. One is regarding the corporate media itself, which has both perpetuated the allegations of "fake news" and been accused of delivering it. Ironically, Trump is correct in referring to these news sources as fake. But they are not fake for the reasons he claims they are fake - which is only regarding how they portray things related to him. They are fake because they ceased being news agencies decades ago. They are now part of the entertainment industry. They are concerned with ratings and advertising profit, not with delivering information to the public. Information does not sell, sensationalism does. Fox News knows this just as much as MSNBC and CNN know this. To earn profit, you need ratings. To get ratings, you need people to tune into your channel. To get people to tune into your channel, you need drama, controversy, fear, sex, shock, sensationalism; in other words, entertainment.

Another point is regarding corporate news as a de facto fourth branch of government. Often referred to throughout history as the fourth estate, media and press journalism have long been relied on to provide a valuable fourth branch of checks and balances in the US. However, as time has gone on, rather than uncovering conflicts of interest, exposing backroom deals, and delivering investigative journalism, the media in the US has become both complicit and indifferent in and to government corruption. This was never more evident than in the months leading up to the Iraq War, which according to Australian journalist John Pilger , may have never happened if journalists had done their job of uncovering truths in the face of, and in spite of, power:

"…had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist."

Media collusion with the power structure has been a central theme to the work of Pilger, who has consistently tied the media's full institutional compliance to what is properly referred to as "the deep state" or "invisible government" through the proliferation of propaganda . This was also the main theme of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, as well as the subsequent 1992 documentary by the same name. According to Chomsky and Herman, mass media in the US "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship , and without overt coercion." Which is to say that profit-driven news not only seeks to appease popular narratives, but also will toe the government line in return for continued access or exclusive scoops, all of which are determined by government officials.

Immortal Technique's 2003 track, The 4th Branch , fortifies the work of Pilger, Chomsky, and Herman by illustrating how the media and its propaganda serve the ruling-class narrative. Released in the aftermath of 9-11 and during the beginnings of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tech weaves multiple theses into a central theme of propaganda versus reality. The hook sums up the track:

It's like MK-ULTRA, controllin' your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fightin' for freedom and fightin' terror, but what's reality
Read about the history of the place that we live in
And stop letting corporate news tell lies to your children

The opening verse introduces us once again to Huntington's clash-of-civilizations narrative and the role of Evangelical Christians in pushing forth this narrative. Tech focuses on the moral bankruptcy of Christian fundamentalism in the US and how US foreign policy is continuously designed on a base of hypocrisy and misinformation, carried out by agents of the capitalist class:

The voice of racism preachin' the gospel is devilish
A fake church called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist
Forgetting God is not a religion, but a spiritual bond
And Jesus is the most quoted prophet in the Qu'ran
They bombed innocent people, tryin' to murder Saddam
When you gave him those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran
This is the information that they hold back from Peter Jennings
Cause Condoleezza Rice is just a new age Sally Hemings

The remainder of the first verse continues the critique on conservative ideology and Christian fundamentalism, tying them into the ultimate hypocrisies perpetrated in the founding of the United States. The miseducation that most of us are subjected to through years of formal education interplay with Tech's exposure of the public misinformation that disseminates from media sources, all of which combine to produce a hidden history of the US that is a perfectly pliable tool firmly in the hands of the ruling class:

I break it down with critical language and spiritual anguish
The Judas I hang with, the guilt of betraying Christ
You murdered and stole his religion, and painting him white
Translated in psychologically tainted philosophy
Conservative political right wing, ideology
Glued together sloppily, the blasphemy of a nation
Got my back to the wall, cause I'm facin' assassination
Guantanamo Bay, federal incarceration
How could this be, the land of the free, home of the brave
Indigenous holocaust and the home of the slaves
Corporate America, dancin' offbeat to the rhythm
You really think this country, never sponsored terrorism
Human rights violations, we continue the saga
El Savador and the contras in Nicaragua
And on top of that, you still wanna take me to prison
Just cause I won't trade humanity for patriotism

Returning to Vinnie Paz's track, Keep Movin' On, we see the experiences and views of an American soldier, handpicked from the working class to serve in illegal and immoral wars and occupations abroad. The verse touches on everything from the recruitment process and the brainwashing effects of patriotism to the gruesome effects of serving as tools of war for the capitalist ruling class :

I signed up cause they promised me some college money
I ain't the smartest motherfucker but I'm not a dummy
They told me I would be stationed in places hot and sunny
I had a lot of pride. Motherfuckers got it from me
These people over here innocent. They never harmed me
My sergeant tried to convince me that they would try to bomb me
I feel like an outsider stuck inside this army
Everybody brainwashed. American zombies
I ain't realized how much it set me back
Until I lost my leg and then they sent me back
I don't have anything now. I'm left with scraps
From a government who created AIDS, invented crack
People told me not to join. I tried to prove 'em wrong
Now I'm homeless and I'm cold without no food thas' warm
I keep asking myself, "What did I do that's wrong?"
And the government telling me, "Keep it movin' on"

Tech's closing comments on the 4th Branch summarizes the class-component that shapes the military industrial complex, a system designed to create, maintain, and protect private profit. Echoing Paz's verse on the experience of soldiers, Tech illustrates our role in this system while touching on the constant propaganda we are bombarded with, which pushes this narrative of "we," as if "we" have anything in common with the American ruling/capitalist class and their servants in mass media.

The fourth branch of the government AKA the media
Seems to now have a retirement plan for ex-military officials
As if their opinion was at all unbiased
A machine shouldn't speak for men
So shut the fuck up you mindless drone
And you know it's serious
When these same media outfits are spending millions of dollars on a PR campaign
To try to convince you they're fair and balanced
When they're some of the most ignorant, and racist people
Giving that type of mentality a safe haven
We act like we share in the spoils of war that they do
We die in wars, we don't get the contracts to make money off 'em afterwards
We don't get weapons contracts, nigga
We don't get cheap labor for our companies, nigga
We are cheap labor, nigga
Turn off the news and read, nigga
Read... read... read

Tech's final verse is powerfully connected to liberation movements of the past, echoing among other the great Irish socialist, James Connolly, and his call for international, working-class solidarity during the beginnings of World War I. In his A Continental Revolution (1914) , Connolly sums up the profit motive and class-basis of war:

"… [in war] the working class are to be sacrificed that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.

… against the patriotism of capitalism - the patriotism which makes the interest of the capitalist class the supreme test of duty and right - I place the patriotism of the working class, the patriotism which judges every public act by its effect upon the fortunes of those who toil.

To me, therefore, the socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist of my own country is a natural enemy."

"Fake news" is simply propaganda constructed through ruling-class channels to boost systems and cultures that support the power structure. In other words, it is the status quo. It is nothing new. It happens rather naturally, flowing from concentrations of money and power. Regarding the newfound liberal version of "fake news," the final point to consider relates to the idea of an outside influence on American politics. Long before the Russia hysteria surfaced, the American political system had been bought and sold numerous times over. To suggest that politicians from either major party ever represented the interests of American people is incredibly naïve. Campaign financing and corporate lobbying determine who wins political races and which legislation is introduced and passed in Congress. Long before Russia was accused of influencing elections, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms were proven to influence elections. Long before Trump supposedly got a boost from Putin, official US policy had been directly shaped by Israeli interests in the Middle East.

Access to oil has always determined foreign policy, access to capital for big business has always determined economic policy, and the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision has ensured that the Kochs', Soros', Gates', and Buffetts' of the world will always hold more political weight within the electoral system than 100 million voters combined, if they so choose. Whether it's Goldman Sachs, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Koch brothers, George Soros, or Putin, the American people have never had a say in what the political machine does or doesn't do. This fact renders the Trump-Russia hysteria as moot. Any real sense of US national interests has long been replaced by the global capitalist order, if they ever truly existed at all. In terms of political empowerment and self-determination for the working-class majority within the US, a foreign president is no different than any number of nameless American millionaire hedge-fund donors.

The Seamless Political Machine and the Failures of Identity Politics: From Reagan to Trump

Within electoral politics, lesser-evilism has become the dominant stance for at least half of the American population. For individual voters, the 2-party duopoly has been mostly abandoned as identifications with either party have reached near-historic lows . As of 2015, nearly half of registered voters identify as something other than Republican or Democrat. However, despite this overwhelming rejection of the 2-party system, many of these voters continue to choose what they view as the "lesser evil" in voting for candidates from one of the two major parties.

Since the Reagan administration and introduction of a seamless political machine based in neoliberalism (an intensification of capitalism), presidential administrations regardless of party have been almost indistinguishable. Despite this seamless identity that's emerged, many voters still insist on claiming differences between the two corporate parties, even if it means choosing what they view as the lesser-evil. The fact that some public radical intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis have proposed lesser-evilism lends this direction some undue credence. However, when we step back and analyze the big picture, away from the emotions that often emerge in the heat of electoral moments, it is easy to see that lesser-evilism, as an electoral tactic embraced by the Left, has pushed the entire political system to the right over the past 40 years. Clear evidence of this shift can be seen in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, which carried forth Reagan-esque economic policy, while also gutting welfare (Clinton), facilitating mass incarceration of the Black community (Clinton), escalating US bombing campaigns (Obama), pushing historical levels of deportation of immigrants (Obama), and maintaining the attack on civil liberties that began under W. Bush (Obama). Even more evidence is the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a candidate who is viewed as being an outlier of the Democratic Party, despite an ideological identity that is consistent with run-of-the-mill liberalism of old. Yet, when compared to a Democratic Party that has clearly shifted rightward, toward more hard-line capitalist-friendly policies that have characterized the neoliberal era started by Reagan, as well as highly-destructive imperialist missions abroad, Sanders looks like a radical.

Killer Mike's 2012 track, Reagan, brings us to the start of the neoliberal era. In a social context, specifically regarding the treatment of Black communities throughout the country, the Reagan era merely picked up on hundreds of years of oppression. By implementing an official "war on drugs," this era provided the basis for what Michelle Alexander termed The New Jim Crow , in her book with the same title. It also created a new wing of the military industrial complex through the construction of an extensive for-profit prison system and widespread militarization of domestic police forces. Mike's second verse introduces us to the Reagan environment, as experienced by the Black community:

The end of the Reagan Era, I'm like 'leven, twelve, or
Old enough to understand the shit'll change forever
They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror
But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever
But mostly black boys, but they would call us "niggers"
And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers
They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches
And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches
And they would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets
I guess that that's the privilege of policing for some profit

The intensification of American policing in poor communities of color served a bigger purpose. As Mike explains in the same verse, it bolstered the cornerstone of US economics and capitalism: free labor. As per the 13th amendment of the US Constitution , "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." In other words, the forced free labor of convicts in the US prison system is still legal. And the "war on drugs" helped to create nearly 1.3 million free laborers for mainstream corporations , as the prison population in the US grew from roughly 300,000 in 1980 to over 1.5 million in 2015 . Killer Mike touches on this:

But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits
Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics
Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they giving drug offenders time in double digits

Mike closes the track by moving the focus from Reagan to the system, telling us that Presidents (and most politicians, for that matter) are nothing more than "employees of the country's real masters," serving capitalist interests rather than the masses of people:

Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor
Just an employee of the country's real masters
Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama
Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters
If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic
Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Gaddafi
We invaded sovereign soil, going after oil
Taking countries is a hobby paid for by the oil lobby
Same as in Iraq, and Afghanistan
And Ahmadinejad say they coming for Iran
They only love the rich, and how they loathe the poor
If I say any more they might be at my door
(Shh..) Who the fuck is that staring in my window
Doing that surveillance on Mr. Michael Render
I'm dropping off the grid before they pump the lead
I leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan dead

Reagan the man may be dead, but his spirit has survived in symbolic terms through the perpetuation of neoliberalism's capitalist/imperialist order. The actions of our last President, Obama, who may appear to be the polar opposite of Reagan in any superficial analysis, confirms this perpetuation. The 2015 remix, Obamanation 4 , hammers this truth home in magnificent fashion. Opening with excerpts of speeches from Malcolm X, the track sets up a premise of systemic analysis as Malcolm rails against the "international Western power structure (capitalism)," calling upon "anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change the miserable conditions on this earth."

Echoing Killer Mike's track, M-1 (from Dead Prez) uses his verse in Obamanation 4 to expose the systemic nature of our political system, illustrating how not only the Democratic Party, but also the first Black President, equal nothing more than cogs in an imperialist machine. His analysis begins by disregarding the propaganda stemming from right-wing sources like Fox News and syndicated radio, all of which claimed Obama represented a diversion from politics-as-usual by having some mythological "radical-left-wing agenda." In reality, Obama's administration continued, and even escalated in some cases, America's imperialist endeavors abroad. M-1 flips this "right-wing propaganda" and puts it back on progressives, rhetorically asking "who you gonna blame" now that the man in charge is no longer a white Republican named Bush:

After you divorce yourself from the right wing propaganda campaign, it's all simple and plain.
America customed the game.
Your President got an African name, now who you gonna blame?
When they drop them bombs out of them planes.
Using depleted uranium, babies looking like two-headed aliens.
Follow the money trail, it leads to the criminal.
Ain't nothing subliminal to it, that's how they do it.

Continuing on this theme, M-1 pinpoints Obama as the new head of the US' global imperialist agenda, even touching on the irony of a Black man carrying out neo-colonialism with white-supremacist underpinnings. M-1's verse is not only insightful in its blanket condemnation of the 2-party machine, but also in its inherent warning about the dangers of a brand of identity politics that seeks to plug folks from historically marginalized groups into the power structure. Ultimately, to M-1, as to all radicals and revolutionaries, it's the system that drives our injustices, not the figureheads chosen to facilitate the system:

See the game they run.
Give a fuck if he's cunning, articulate, and handsome.
Afghanistan held for ransom.
By the hand of this black man, neo-colonial puppet.
White power with a black face, he said fuck it I'll do it.
…. Last stage of imperialism, I ain't kiddin.
In the immortal words of Marvin Gaye 'This ain't living.'

On the same track, Black the Ripper picks up on M-1's analysis, keeping the focus on Obama as nothing more than a figurehead of a system that must be opposed. This particular verse includes a harsh critique, deploying the house-slave mentality in describing Black figures in power, as well as their accomplices:

See it's not where you're from, it's where you're at.
He's sitting in the White House, so who cares if he's black?
And why's there still soldiers out there in Iraq?
Natural resources ain't yours, it's theirs, give it back!
You're just another puppet, but I'm not surprised
Look at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
They didn't change shit, house nigga's fresh off the slave ship.

The Obamanation remix includes a verse from Lupe Fiasco's track, Words I Never Said. The verse fits the overall narrative perfectly, keeping focus on systemic operations. Lupe takes the analysis even further, touching on various social aspects stemming from capitalism and imperialism, most notably those which keep the American public in line, agreeable, and ignorant through a process of devalued education, fear-mongering, and mind-numbing celebrity gossip. All of this, Lupe suggests, leads to what Chomsky has referred to as "manufactured consent," which he strongly rejects:

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit.
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets.
How much money does it take to really make a full clip?
9/11, building 7, did they really pull it?
Uh, and a bunch of other coverups.
Your child's future was the first to go with budget cuts.
If you think that hurts, then wait, here comes the uppercut.
The school was garbage in the first place, that's on the up and up.
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper crust.
You get it, then they move it, so you never keeping up enough.
If you turn on TV, all you see's a bunch of "what the fucks."
Dude is dating so and so, blabbering 'bout such and such.
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homey, that's the news.
And these the same people supposedly telling us the truth.
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist.
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say shit.
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either.
I'm a part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful.
And I believe in the people.

Lowkey concludes the remix with a strong verse on American imperialism, an agenda that has become indistinguishable between various Presidents and both corporate parties. He points to specific missions carried out under the Obama administration, seemingly calling to attention those who continue to portray Obama as a separation from the Bush administration. The verse serves as a prophetic warning about Syria, and nails home M-1's earlier reduction of Obama as just another "neo-colonial puppet" doing the job that every American President is called upon to do, including bombing an African country (Libya) and disposing of a leader (Gaddafi) known for promoting pan-Africanism throughout the continent:

Was the bigger threat from Osama or from Obama?
Military bases from Chagos to Okinawa.
I say things that other rappers won't say.
Cause my mind never closed like Guantanamo Bay.
Hope you didn't build a statue or tattoo your arm.
Cause the drones are still flying over Pashtunistan.
Did he defend the war? No! He extended more.
He even had the time to attempt a coup in Ecuador.
Morales and Chavez, the state's are on a hunt for ya.
Military now stationed on bases in Columbia.
Take a trip to the past and tell em I was right.
Ask Ali Abunimah or Jeremiah Wright.
Drones over Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya.
Is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?
First black president, the masses were hungry.
But the same president just bombed an African country.

The false hopes placed in the first Black President highlight the failures and pitfalls of identity politics, a political approach that is grounded in assimilation. This approach to social justice attempts to mold a multicultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript power elite by simply placing individuals who identify with these hyper-marginalized groups into the existing power structure. Thus, the ultimate goal is more Black bankers, more gay landlords, more transgender politicians, more women Senators, and so on. This approach has led to the creation of what the left-wing publication Black Agenda Report (BAR) has deemed the black misleadership class in the US. Obama was the ultimate product of this class, but not the totality of it. For as long as identity politics seek to assimilate into the power structure, this class will persist, as will the formation of other such classes: the gay misleadership class, the transgender misleadership class, the women's misleadership class (Hillary), etc..., because, ultimately, the power structure does not exist to serve the people, no matter how diverse it is. Nas touches on this in his 1999 track, I Want to Talk to You , which addresses the frustrations of living under a government that does not represent:

Step up to the White House, let me in
What's my reason for being, I'm ya next of kin
And we built this motherfucker
You wanna kill me because my hunger?
Mr. America, young black niggas want ya
I wanna talk to the man, understand?
Understand this motherfuckin G-pack in my hand
Look what happened to San Fran
Young girl hit by policeman
Twelve shots up in her dome, damn
….Dissin us, discrimination different races
Tax payers pay for more jail for Black Latin faces

Coming full circle, Nas closes the track by delivering a prophetic warning against identity politics, characterizing BAR's "black misleadership class" as nothing more than "fake black leaders [who] are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget (rather than addressing problems that plague their communities)."

What y'all waitin for the world to blow up
Before you hear this rewind this 4 minutes before we timeless
Let y'all niggas bang my shit before Saddam hits
Let Nastradamus tell us what time it is
They try to buy us with doe
Fake black leaders are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget
The news got it all confused lyin to the public
They eyes watchin stay wise move above it
Water floods predicted, hurricanes, twisters
Its all signs of the Armageddon, three sixes
People reverse the system, politics vs. religion
Holy war, Muslim vs. Christians
Niggas in high places, they don't got the balls for this
People in power sit back and watch them slaughter us
Mr. President I assume it was negligence
The streets upside down, I'm here to represent this

Confronting the Power Structure

Modern working-class resistance is still rooted in Marx's class war analysis, whereas the proletariat (those of us who are forced to depend on our labor to survive) finds itself fighting for its collective life against the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) and the layered power structure created by this economic realtionship. It is also crucially intertwined in the fights against other forms of structural oppression, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny; because, quite frankly, all forms of oppression that splinter the working class must be effectively destroyed if the working class has any hopes of overcoming the capitalist system.

In echoing Malcolm X's famous "the ballot or the bullet" speech from 1964, working-class resistance must include "action on all fronts by whatever means necessary." Since the police represent the front lines of a criminal justice system inherently designed to enforce class oppression, as well as structural white supremacy, working-class resistance must include a firm stance against not only police brutality and mass incarceration, but also against the very foundation of modern policing, which is rooted in "slave-catching" and strike-breaking. This means standing in blanket opposition to policing as an institution designed to "serve and protect" capitalist property and enforce laws created by a capitalist ruling class with capitalist interests in mind. Reflecting on the Black community's especially intense history of oppression at the hands of police, hip hop has delivered a proper analysis and call to action. From NWA's seminal track Fuck tha Police (1988) to David Banner and Tito Lo's Black Fist (2016), the armed extension of the capitalist state is consistently exposed, as it has left countless Black lives lying in its tracks with no signs of slowing. Banner and Lo's track captures the sheer anger and frustration stemming from this reality:

[Banner]

These crackers got drones. They are flying their saucers
Keep your white jesus, don't pray to your crosses
They are burning our churches, K.R.I.T. pass me the UZI
I know how to work it; I know how to Squirt it
No Martin, No Luther, No King, No Marching No choirs don't sing
The same christian lovers that raped our GrandMothers and hung our GrandFathers from trees
They are enemies!
Blood on the leaves, blood on the streets, blood on our feet
I'm sick of walking, I'm sick of dogs getting sicced on us, I'm sick of barking
I'm sick of spitting written sentences listeners don't get
Don't get, don't get, don't get!
Because they got Chains on their brains and that is not a diss

[Lo]

… I'm staying religious, cause we stay in the trenches
And gotta play where they lynch us, done came to my senses
I bet them crackas never came through my fences
Ya burn up ya cross, and I'll burn up ya corpse
Then I turn and bang and do the same to the witness
Hang 'em and dangle 'em in the street looking up at his feet
So you never forget this we did this for Martin and Malcolm, even Mandela
Jimmie Lee Jackson and then Medgar Evers
For Clyde Kennard, hard labor slaving in the yard
For Huey, for Hampton, for Bobby we GODLY
For Jordan Davis we gon' play this, for Sandra Bland we gon' stand
I'm still out here stomping, for Janaya Thompson, from the Coast to Compton

The video for Black Fist shows a series of events that encapsulate what working-class justice would look like outside the parameters of capitalism and white supremacy. This includes a people's arrest, people's trial, and subsequent execution of a police officer who was acquitted of murdering a Black teenager. The fact that this hypothetical scenario could be remotely controversial illustrates how strong we've been conditioned to equate our current system with any real sense of justice, of which there is very little if any. The environment of injustice that is bred under so-called legalities is masterfully summed up in Lauryn Hill's Mystery of Iniquity (2002):

Ya'll can't handle the truth in a courtroom of lies
Perjures the jurors
Witness despised
Crooked lawyers
False Indictments publicized
Its entertainment the arraignments
The subpoenas
High profile gladiators in bloodthirsty arenas
Enter the Dragon
Black-robe crooked-balance
Souls bought and sold and paroled for thirty talents
Court reporter catch the surface on the paper
File it in the system not acknowledged by the Maker
Swearing by the bible blatantly blasphemous
Publicly perpetrating that "In God We Trust"
Cross-examined by a master manipulator
The faster intimidator
Receiving the judge's favor
Deceiving sabers doing injury to they neighbors
For status, gratis, apparatus and legal waivers
See the bailiff
Representing security
Holding the word of God soliciting perjury
The prosecution
Political prostitution
The more money you pay.. the further away solution

…Blind leading the blind
Guilty never defined
Filthy as swine
A generation purin it's own mind
Legal extortion
Blown out of proportion
In vein deceit
The truth is obsolete
Only two positions:
Victimizer or Victim
Both end up in destruction trusting this crooked system

Running hand in hand with capitalism's version of "justice" is the underlying dominance of white supremacy. In the formation of the United States as a nation, as well as the customs, cultures, and systems we've become accustomed to during this process, white supremacy has played a formidable role. It has created an all-powerful wedge among the working class, rendering its potential limited. Its divisive message is often hidden in powerfully emotional rhetoric regarding "American values" and patriotism, all of which secretly (or not so secretly in the era of Trump) call for protecting the Eurocentrism that has systematically devalued black skin in dominant American culture. In an old-school track from 1991, Ice Cube uses brilliant analogy and powerful lyrics while condemning America's history of white supremacy and challenging the toxicity of patriotic rhetoric, concluding with the need to " kill Sam":

I wanna kill him, cause he tried to play me like the trick
But you see, I'm the wrong nigga to fuck with
I got the A to the motherfuckin K, and it's ready to rip
Slapped in my banana clip
And I'm lookin.. (lookin..)
Is he in watts, oakland, philly or brooklyn?
It seems like he got the whole country behind him
So it's sort of hard to find him
But when I do, gotta put my gat in his mouth
Pump seventeen rounds make his brains hang out
Cause the shit he did was uncalled for
Tried to fuck a brother up the ass like a small whore
And that shit ain't fly
So now I'm settin up, the ultimate drive-by
And when you hear this shit
It make the world say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Here's why I wanna kill the punk
Cause he tried to take a motherfuckin chunk of the funk
He came to my house, I let 'em bail in
Cause he said he was down with the l.m
He gave up a little dap
Then turned around, and pulled out a gat
I knew it was a caper
I said, "please don't kill my mother, " so he raped her
Tied me up, took me outside
And I was thrown in a big truck
And it was packed like sardines
Full of niggas, who fell for the same scheme
Took us to a place and made us work
All day and we couldn't have shit to say
Broke up the families forever
And to this day black folks can't stick together
And it's odd..
Broke us down, made us pray - to his god
And when I think about it
It make me say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Now in ninety-one, he wanna tax me
I remember, the son of a bitch used to axe me
And hang me by a rope til my neck snapped
Now the sneaky motherfucker wanna ban rap
And put me under dirt or concrete
But god, can see through a white sheet
Cause you the devil in drag
You can burn your cross well I'll burn your flag
Try to give me the h-I-v
So I can stop makin babies like me
And you're givin dope to my people chump
Just wait til we get over that hump
Cause yo' ass is grass cause I'mma blast
Can't bury rap, like you buried jazz
Cause we stopped bein whores, stop doin floors
So bitch you can fight your own wars
So if you see a man in red white and blue
Gettin chased by the lench mob crew
It's a man who deserves to buckle
I wanna kill sam cause he ain't my motherfuckin uncle!

Ultimately, resistance in the 21st century must focus on the inherent inequities created by the capitalist system and the corrollary social hierarchies that support these inequities. There simply is no choice but to destroy and replace this system. Gang Starr's 1998 track Robbin' Hood Theory hammers this home, urging us to "squeeze the juice out of all the suckers with power, and pour some back out so as to water the flowers." Just as reparations are needed to begin to address the history of Black enslavement in America, so too is mass working-class expropriation of the capitalist class. In realizing the illegitimacies of the wealth accumulated under this system , we must formulate bold moves toward recuperating it for all of society. Guru preaches, leaving us with our battle cry:

Now that we're getting somewhere, you know we got to give back
For the youth is the future no doubt that's right and exact
Squeeze the juice out, of all the suckers with power
And pour some back out, so as to water the flowers
This world is ours, that's why the demons are leery
It's our inheritance; this is my Robin Hood Theory... Robin Hood Theory

… They innocent, they know not what they face
While politicians save face genius minds lay to waste
If I wasn't kickin rhymes I'd be kickin down doors
Creatin social change and defendin the poor
The God's always been militant, and ready for war
We're gonna snatch up the ringleaders send em home in they drawers
But first where's the safe at? Let's make em show us
And tell em hurry up, give up the loot that they owe us
We bringin it back, around the way to our peeps
Cause times are way too deep, we know the Code of the Streets
Meet your defeat; this is my Robin Hood Theory... my Robin Hood Theory

…Necessary by all means, sort of like Malcolm
Before it's too late; I create, the best outcome
So I take this opportunity, yes to ruin the
Devilish forces fucking up my black community
And we ain't doing no more interviews
Til we get paid out the frame, like motherfucking Donahue
We're taking over radio, and wack media
Cause systematically they getting greedier and greedier
Conquering turfs with my ill organization
Takin out the man while we scan the information
You wanna rhyme you best await son
You can't even come near, if you ain't got our share
You front on us this year, consider yourself blown out of here
Yeah... by my Robin Hood Theory