Critical Pedagogy and the International Marxist Humanist Initiative

• In Event: The Peter McLaren Reader: Reflecting on Three Decades of Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper will advance the theoretical argument that revolutionary critical pedagogy must stress a living Marxism by encouraging each generation to discover what Marx's Marxism means for the current historical juncture. I will make the case, both theoretically and philosophically, that revolutionary critical pedagogy has the strongest potential to create the conditions of possibility for teachers and students to work jointly in theorizing a viable vision of an alternative to capitalism—a new, human society— that can give form and direction to today’s struggles for social justice. Through an analysis of the research on critical pedagogy over the past 25 years, I attempt to make the case that by developing a unity of theory and practice, worker and intellectual, and philosophy and organization, revolutionary critical pedagogy must be informed by a break with the law of value and forge an ethical commitment to create a mode of production that reflects freely associated human relations. It does this by examining the totality of Marx’s Marxism, as developed from 1841 to 1883, emphasizing the “dialectic of negativity as a moving and creating principle” and thereby concretizing Marx’s Marxism for our time as a dialectical, critical concept of “revolution in permanence.”

The paper concludes that we need to move beyond a mere rejection of current incarnations of neoliberal capitalism in order to articulate Marx's naturalist or humanist vision, emphasizing Marx’s stress on the Hegelian principle of the dialectical positive in the negative. The methodology informing this paper is based on a historical materialist analysis and critical hermeneutics and it’s significance in scholarly terms lies in its development of critical pedagogy not as a set of methods for the classroom but rather as a philosophy of praxis. In this way it constitutes a significant advance in Freirean-based approaches to critical pedagogy currently in the literature.

Author

• Peter L. McLaren, Chapman University