From Right-to-Work to Lenin's Communist Pedagogy

• In Event: 41.084 - Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 41.084-14 - Imagining Education: Beyond the Logic and Learning in Neoliberal Capitalism

Abstract

This paper examines so-called Right-to-Work (RTW) laws as a nearly seventy-year-old push by the capitalist state machine to not only dislodge restrictions on capital’s ability to increase the rate of exploitation of labor power as one of many measures to counter falling rates of profit, but as an attack on communism as well. This focus is markedly different from the analysis generally offered by the educational Left in the U.S., which tends to focus exclusively on the privatization of public education and the devastating restrictions on public sector unions as attacks on the public sphere and democracy. These notions suggest that neoliberal policies can be rolled back for a kinder, more egalitarian capitalism.

The analysis articulated within this paper is therefore based on the assumption that the struggle against RTW should be understood, expressed, and engaged as part of the global, anti-capitalist movement itself. In the process, following Lenin, the case is made that the only realistic way to defeat capitalism is through an organized movement, or through the Party-form (i.e. a communist party). Within this discussion I point to some of the ways Lenin’s discussion on the communist party offers pedagogical insights.
When it comes to proletarian, communist revolutionary praxis Lenin remains the world’s foremost master educator. Lenin’s What is to be done? stands as the premier guide for the construction and enactment of a workers movement (i.e. the party form) aimed at the negation of the negation or resolving the essential contradiction within capitalism (i.e. creating socialism and then communism out of the capitalist present).

This paper contributes to Marxist educational theory not by drawing on Lenin’s insights on imperialism to provide a deeper context to understand the purpose of capitalist schooling in the contemporary era as others have brilliantly done (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2005). I also do not attempt to pull out Lenin’s limited, and mostly unfavorable, statements on the bourgeois states’ formal education (Boxley, 2014), since his project was aimed at replacing the bourgeois state with the proletarian state. Rather, this essay contributes by offering Lenin himself as a leading radical pedagogue in his own right.

Lenin’s (1902/1975) globally influential pamphlet, What is to be done?, has served as the philosophical foundation for nearly every anti-colonialist and working-class revolution since its publication, including the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and therefore offers an approach to communist party pedagogy worth fleshing out and bringing to the surface. In this paper I therefore outline a communist party pedagogy against RTW built around What is to be done?. What I offer is not the pedagogy of Lenin, but communist party pedagogy as theorized by Lenin.

Author

• Curry Stephenson Malott, West Chester University of Pennsylvania