Education Activism as Affirmative Resistance: Examples of Real Educational Utopias Through and Outside the State

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Across the globe social movements are resisting market and profit-based approaches to education and seeking to make public schooling more equitable and socially responsive. At the same time, educators, activists, and artists are creating new spaces of learning that prefigure the kind of education we seek within a post-capitalist world. We refer to this notion of combining resistance with the creation of alternatives as “affirmative resistance” which is in line with the solidarity economy movement or what Wright (2020) called “real utopias”.
This panel will take up the issue of how activists work to create radical education alternatives while also negotiating their relationship with the State. This may mean working within or through the State, in partnership with the state, or against the State, that is, seeking autonomy within civil society. In some cases, it means seeking to pressure the State to change policies that tend to suppress radical alternatives.
Referring to prefiguration theory, Maeckelbergh (2011) argues for a dual strategy which claims that for prefiguration to function, groups must also put pressure on the existing political structures while they simultaneously build what will eventually come to replace these structures. The concept of prefigurative politics, widely popularized by Wini Breines (1989) in her book Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962-1968, is often associated with anarchist, autonomous, anti-statist forms of political organizing. However, it was actually Carl Boggs’ 1974 article “Gramsci’s Theory of the Factory Councils” published in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology that first uses the term “prefigurative.” Boggs introduces the idea of prefigurative politics in the 1970s, not to promote it over other forms of struggle, but rather, to call for the unity of prefigurative and institutional strategy.
Drawing on cases from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba and the U.S., the authors will draw on both research and experience to demonstrate how activists and social movements have engaged in affirmative resistance through and against the state. Because formal education in most countries is provided by the State, it becomes central to any attempt to make significant change in education. While some activists may try to avoid confrontation with the state by creating alternatives within civil society, they may still rely on the State for bureaucratic and financial resources. While non-state actors, such as foundations and venture philanthropy, may be an alternative, they require an ideological return on investment that may represent the same pressures as the State.
It is helpful to remember that Antonio Gramsci’s notion of counterhegemony was as much directed toward civil society as it was at the State and the market. He saw the State and the market as extending into civil society organizations where particular practices and subjectivities were created and reinforced, naturalizing capitalist relations through the texture of everyday life,
Hegemony within the realm of civil society is then grasped when the citizenry come to believe that authority over their lives emanates from the self. Hegemony is therefore articulated through capillary power—akin to an incorporeal government—when it is transmitted organically through various social institutions, such as schools, street layouts, names, architecture, the family, workplace or church. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 268)
Gramsci’s contribution help us appreciate the difficulty of creating sites of affirmative resistance, since all three sectors of society are saturated by the hegemony of capitalistic logics that are morphing and intensifying under surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019). While there are encouraging signs today of a diversity of social movements, including an upsurge in union organizing within civil society, Boggs’ (2000) warnings about State and corporate control are more daunting today than they were in Gramsci’s day,
...the glib celebration of “civil society” as an emancipatory realm directed against bureaucratic State power not only sidesteps the issue of corporate colonization but also oversimplifies the nature of both State and civil society insofar as the boundaries that now presumably exist between the two are increasingly blurred .... Only through general popular engagements in the public sphere, leading to democratic transformation of both civil society and the State, can we imagine the kind of political renewal needed to sustain ‘deep citizenship’ and confront major social problems. (p. 255)

In this panel, we theorize the strategies that activists have embraced to engage the state and prefigure alternative educational practices. While some affirmative resistance seeks autonomy from the State (paper #1 Teens Take Charge in New York City and paper #3: the schools of the Zapatista movement in Mexico), some work entirely within the State (paper #1: El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in New York City and paper #2 the José Martí Pioneer Organization in Cuba). Other social movements maintain a high level of autonomy while engaging communities in a process of co-governing state institutions (paper #1: the Bachilleratos Populares in Argentina, paper #3: The Landless Workers Movement in Brazil and paper 4: the Brazilian teacher union movement).
Whether referred to as third spaces, real utopias, or affirmative resistance, the organizations we take up in this panel represent social spaces that exist in the present and prefigure, with all of their limitations and contradictions, a post-capitalist world in the making.

References
Anderson, G., Desai, D., Heras, A., Spreen, C. (2023). Creating third spaces of learning for post-capitalism: Lessons from educators, artists and activists. Routledge.
Biesta, G. (2021). World-centered education: A view for the present. Routledge.
Choudry, A. (2015). Learning activism: The intellectual life of contemporary social movements.
University of Toronto Press.
Choudry, A., & Vally, S. (Eds.). (2017). Reflections on knowledge, learning and social movements: History’s schools. Routledge.
Maeckelbergh, A. (2011). Doing is believing: Prefiguration as strategic practice in the
alterglobalization movement. Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 10(1),
1–20.
Wright, E. O. (2020). Envisioning real utopias. Verso Books.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Organizers

• Gary Anderson, NYU

• Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University

Chair

• Gary Anderson, NYU

Individual Presentations

• Social Movement and Activist Learning: Youth Activism in New York City and Buenos Aires - Gary Anderson, NYU; Carol Anne Spreen, New York Univesity

• Developing Youth for a Socialist Society: The Role of the José Martí Pioneer Organization in Cuba - Mark Ginsburg, University of Maryland

• Strategies for Building Real Educational Utopias in Brazil and Mexico - Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University

• Social Movement Unionism, Social Participation, and State-Union Relations among Education Workers in Brazil (2003-2023) - Heleno Araujo, Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores em Educação (CNTE-Brasil)

• The Restructuring of Teachers’ Work within the Confluence of the Post-Pandemic and Hyper-Technological Eras - Dalila Andrade Oliveira, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; Sofia Viseu, Instituto de Educação, Universidade de Lisboa

Discussant

• Dipti Desai, New York University