Theories of conviction: The return of marxist theorizing

Educational Theory

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 85-101

  Margonis, Frank ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF UTAH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 53149083336     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1998.00085.x     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Emma Goldman, "The Traffic in Women," In On Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing, 1910), 184.
2. Malcolm X, Quoted in Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1993), 53.
3. Eugene V. Debs, Quoted in Ray Ginger, Eugene V. Debs: The Making of an American Radical (New York: Collier, 1949), 395.
4. Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1965).
5. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx, trans. R. J. Goldstein and James CascaitoNew York (1991), 157-59.
6. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mcpham, and Kate Super (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 81, 83.
7. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory (New York: Guilford, 1991), 56.
8. Richard A. Brosio, A Radical Democratic Critique of Capitalist Education (New York: Peter Lang,! 1994), Henceforth RDC; Raymond Allan Morrow and Carlos Alberto Torres, Social Theory and Education: A Critique of Social and Cultural Reproduction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) This hook will be cited as STE in the text for all subsequent references.
9. Contrary to charges made by some commentators, there is nothing inherently apolitical about postmodern thought. Much postmodern theory is less ambitious than Marxist theorizing and refuses to offer a political direction, leaving such decisions to the particular people involved in the circumstance in question.
10. Broslo draws this analysis from the work of Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin, Schooling and Work in the Democratic State (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985.
11. Morrow and Torres Develop an engaging critical review of Carnoy and Levin's work; see STE, pp. 351-57.
12. See, for example, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's criticisms of Illich in Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic, 1976), 256-62.
13. See Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973) And Deschooling Society(W# York: Harper and Row, 1971).
14. An adequate response to this criticism would - in keeping with Bowles and Gintis's model - need to focus heavily on the "social relations of production" arguing that capitalism places the employer in a position where the purchased labor power must be transformed into actual labor through a variety of undemocratic means. This hierarchical labor process might exist in "socialist" societies, but such societies would be socialist in name only, for they would not be characterized by emancipated labor. Hence, Bowles and Gintis's model would require that socialist societies emancipated labor through workplace democracy.
15. Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 144.
16. Eugene V. Debs, Eugene Debs Speaks (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), 65.
17. Daniel Listen, Capitalist Schools (New York: Routledge, 1988).
18. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) and Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity," in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard Bernstein (Cambridge: MIT, 1985).
19. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 157.
20. Morrow and Torres Have a long discussion noting the historical disjuncture between Gramscian ana Frankfurt School theories of history. They argue that Michael Apple and Henry Giroux are notable for combining the two traditions and that the positions can be complementary (STE,). The works of Apple and Giroux that they cite on this point are:329-330.
21. Michael Apple, "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Class Formation and Capitalist Schools," History of Education Quarterly 28, 231-41.
22. Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education (Amherst, Mass.: Beifgin and Garvey, 1983).
23. Best and Kellner Complain that too few Marxists have been willing to engage postmodern thought and make use of its social analysis. See Postmodern Theory, pp. 252-53. However, it is also clear that postmodern dismissals of all modernist theory have not set the stage for meaningful discussion.
24. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 36-37.
25. Karl Marx, Capital trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1967), 169.1.
26. Benjamin Demott, The Imperial Middle (New Haven: Yale University, 1990].
27. Herbert Aptheker, "Power in America" in C. Wright Mills and The Power Elite, eds. G. William Domhoff and Hoyt B. Ballard (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 145-46.
28. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Newell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 162, 184.
29. Guadalupe San Miguel, "The Struggle Against Separate and Unequal Schools: Middle Class Mexican Americans and the Desegregation Campaign in Texas, 1929-1957," in The Social History of American Education, eds. B. Edward McClellan and William J. Reese (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 345-46.
30. Indeed, Morrow and Torres criticize Gramsci's emphasis upon economic influences (STE, p. 280).
31. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffc, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985).
32. Michael Apple and Lois We is, eds., Ideology and Practice in Schooling(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983) and Cameron McCarthy and Michael Apple, "Race, Class, and Gender in American Educational Research" in Class. Race and Gender in American Education, ed. Lois Weis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
33. René Descartes, Philosophical Letters, trans. Anthony Kenny (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 50-51.
34. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 171.
35. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967).
36. Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 10, 26.
37. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the'UnitedStates (New York: Routledge, 1986), 33, 37.
38. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1991) and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).
39. David Roediger, Toward the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994), 25.
40. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 33.
41. Douglas Massey and Nancy Demon, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
42. J. Kirschenman and K. Neckerman, "'We'd love to hire them, but...' The Meaning of Race for Employers" in The Urban Underclass, ed. Christopher Jencks and Paul Peterson (Washington: Brookings, 1991).
43. Gary Orfield and Carol Ashkinaze, The Closing Door: Conservative Policy and Black Opportunity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
44. Nancy Fraser Argues that an absence of a clear defense of A normative position in Foucault's work leaves him unable to respond to the questions raised by his analysis of control. See Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 27.
45. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 51. Valerie Walkerclinc shows the power of this analysis in her critique of progressive education, "Progressive Pedagogy and Political Struggle," in Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, ed. Carmen Luke and Jennifer Core (New York: Routledge, 1992).
46. Karl Marx, The Early Writings, trans. T.B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), 122-31.
47. Debs quoted in Ginger, Eugene V. Debs, 394.
48. Pam Belluch, "Tribe's New Power Over Welfare May Come at Too High a Price"New York Times. 9 September 1997.
49. Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Faxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991) and Michael Apple, "Constructing the Other" in Race, Identity, and Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow (New York: Routiedge, 1993).
50. Here the extension of Lyotard's claims in The Postmodern Condition from the state of knowledge at the university to the larger society is problematic (and quite likely to be contrary to Lyotard's expectations). Sociological studies have not shown a complete abandonment of metanarratives among the population.
51. Jennifer Hochschild, What's Fair American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
52. James Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
53. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
54. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 346.
55. Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez, Learning to Question (New York: Continuum, 1989, 68.
56. Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
57. Given one interpretation of Wittgenstein, we might say that people can create joint understandings to the degree that they participate in the same "forms of life" and "language games" together. One way to do this is to codevelop new forms of life and language games, which political praxis surely does. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan). Wittgenstein's conception of meaning-where words gain their meaning from the role they play in practice - is a competing perspective to poststructural views of discourse.1958.
58. Juliet Schor, The Overworked American (New York; Basic Books, 1992), 75.