Table Of ContentCapitalism-Culture and
Educational Praxis
A Long Revolution
Andrew Gitlin
Capitalism-Culture and Educational Praxis
Andrew Gitlin
Capitalism-Culture
and Educational Praxis
A Long Revolution
Andrew Gitlin
University of Georgia
Athens, GA, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-18210-5 ISBN 978-3-031-18211-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18211-2
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P
refAce
ArchitecturAl Design
Given some very helpful reviews, I want to provide a few comments that
should allow you, the reader, to make informed choices concerning your
movement through this book. If successful, this should make it easier for
you to see and use the book’s design features to meet your needs.
The first aspect of the book design I want to mention is the use of per-
sonal experiences that are put in italics to clearly demarcate the start and
endpoints of my personal experience sections. To begin, I don’t want to
position myself as an author conveying a set of truths or scientific objective
conclusions to the reader. Rather, I see myself as a learner, constantly try-
ing to see his own biases to critically look at them and modify or replace
them. I do so, because unless I can see more broadly and widen my hori-
zons, I am stuck in a place where my consciousness can’t consider the
changes occurring on the ground. When one is blind to those changes, s/
he is less able to act, to see, and make changes on the ground. As Marx
notes, the point of expanding one’s consciousness is not primarily to
understand the world better but centrally to change the world. In this way,
the listing of personal experiences, my activism in the world, has nothing
to do with an autobiographical methodology but rather highlights the
roots of my reflections, theoretical extensions, and biases. Taken together,
these personal experiences are included to show my development in terms
of activism and conceptual issues over time. I hope that you will want to
go through a similar process and utilize this design as a template for your
own process of activism and consciousness development. While these
v
vi PREFACE
reasons may be convincing for a few, others won’t care to read these itali-
cized personal experience sections. They are in italics to let you make a
choice—feel free to skip them—you won’t miss a beat.
A second aspect of the architectural design of this book is that it out-
lines a knowledge production process in three connected parts: a critical
history; conceptual extensions and praxis. This history should identify
trends in your work or a field of study (or both) that you find disquieting
and/or reflect only a dominant standpoint. To make this history critical
requires you to expose and alter disquieting trends and expand the stand-
point to include marginalized groups. This critical move to redirect these
trends can lead to the identification of problems in the current theories
you are using and in your own work. These problems, in turn, encourage
conceptual developments, a connected second part of the knowledge pro-
duction process. When this sort of development occurs, theories (your
own and theories you use) can be extended. By making these extensions
you move, at least slightly, from being the object of a theory to a critical
subject that helps you name the theory—your version that is found to be
desirable. Finally, if the object of the knowledge production process is
change (never mind a long revolution), it is essential to include a praxis
that moves back and forth between theory and practice such that practice
changes theory as theory changes the path of practice. Understanding and
acting on the contextual possibilities and constraints (including the mate-
rial conditions of production) is a key factor in a Marxist view of praxis.
This view of knowledge production and praxis can make sustainable
changes over time or even transformations in society. With this design in
mind, you can utilize or, better yet, extend this knowledge production
process—to make it your own.
A third and final aspect of this book’s architectural design involves
addressing and challenging the inherent problems of looking at a group
such as educational critical theorists (ECTs). All groups have differ-
ences within them. If you don’t emphasize these “within differences,” you
are not providing a complete picture of the group. On the other hand, if
you only emphasize the internal differences, the commonality of the group
starts to become more opaque. To minimize this problem (it is very diffi-
cult to eliminate it), whenever I use ECT it refers to EC-Theorists
(ECTs) in the United States only. As will be pointed out later, for exam-
ple, the Educational Critical Theorists (ECTs) dramatically differ when
the United States is compared to the UK. Furthermore, critical theory has
become used by many diverse groups of theorists including
PREFACE vii
post-modernists and critical race theorists such that critical theory has lit-
tle or no inherent consistent meaning. For this reason, critical theory is
capitalized, Critical Theory, not to suggest its importance but rather to
indicate that I am talking about a specific take on critical theory—Critical
Theory emerging from ECTs. It may be helpful to emphasize I am talk-
ing about a particular group and a particular theory that allows you to
make your own decisions on how to utilize Critical Theory, make concep-
tual extensions, and engage in praxis within an ECT framework to better
understand oppression and act on it to change the world.
Athens, GA, USA Andrew Gitlin
c
ontents
1 Becoming Academic: The Construction of Political Bias 1
2 A Critical History of ECT: From Marxism to Culturalism 9
3 Finding Capitalist-Cultural Connections: Marx & Others 39
4 Oneness of Capitalism-Culture Within ECT 73
5 Marxist Praxis 107
6 Extending Marxist Praxis Within ECT 117
7 That Can’t Be Done Here or Can It? 157
8 Postscript: Completing the Circle 193
Canuimagine 197
References 199
Index 211
ix
CHAPTER 1
Becoming Academic: The Construction
of Political Bias
Abstract This chapter, based on Marx, suggests that a first step in the
humanization of the world is to see what is currently opaque and once
seen, to act on those limits in a way that opens up one’s horizon to create
sustainable humanizing change that boldly moves beyond the status quo.
When successful, this form of praxis (linking theory and activism) creates
new possibilities as well as a more complete understanding of how essences
(materialist structures) and appearances (social/cultural) reflect a oneness
that shapes everyday experiences. To facilitate this process, this chapter
articulates what is, and the importance of, both a critical history of your
field of study that is centered within a social/materialist history and a criti-
cal personal history that places the self within a social/materialist context
over time. Both of these critical histories focus on significant limits in both
the field and self. Importantly, because this book tries to illustrate rather
than dictate ways to move forward, it provides exemplars of how these
histories might be constructed but in the end this is your choice.
Seeing BiaSeS
George Floyd’s brutal lynching by police sparked worldwide activist pro-
tests (Dave, 6/2020) along with a great deal of personal anguish. Why
wasn’t I involved in these protests? Why did my work as a critical theorist
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2023
A. Gitlin, Capitalism-Culture and Educational Praxis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18211-2_1
2 A. GITLIN
rarely focus on race? And centrally, why didn’t Educational Critical Theory
(ECT), especially coming out of the United States,1 play a part in guiding,
directing, or even shaping these global protests? As I do with many such
questions, I began by rereading ECT texts and foundational books that
had shaped my love for critical theory, including the writings of Karl Marx
that addressed related educational issues (Wetherly, 2005; Wright, 1978;
Marx, 1976, 1977, 1978a; Braverman, 1974). Importantly, I specifically
reread some of the critical thinkers on culture and race (Crenshaw et al.,
1996; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1993; Anzaldua, 1987; Omi & Winant,
1986). Early in this initial process, I realized that doing a history of ECT
was essential to get answers to my initial questions as well as to those that
emerged from my reading. It also became obvious that any history of criti-
cal theory needed to not only look out at the work of others but also look
in at my own work. The inclusion of my work, however, should not be
taken as a sign that I played a central part in the ECT community; I did
not. Moreover, it is important to remember as Marx (1978b) suggests that
Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circum-
stances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. (p. 10)
The existing underlying circumstances, however, can only be challenged if
actors, in collaboration with others, transform themselves as the social
(e.g., cultural) and economic conditions of existence (Marx in Allman,
2007) are changed as well. This focus on self-transformation suggests that
writing a history of critical theory needs to pay attention to the role of
education in promoting or hindering self-transformation or even self-
development as well as a critique of social and economic pre-existing con-
ditions (i.e., the past up to present). My critical personal history is in
part my educational development that runs side by side with the broader
history of ECT on the pre-existing social and economic conditions of exis-
tence that sets the boundaries and possibilities of this unfolding history.
With that said, I will try to keep my personal history as brief as possi-
ble and provide it as an interlude to the central story of the ECT history.
This history not only touches on the initial personal questions posed above
but concentrates on two central observations stemming from my
1 Hereafter, ECT will be used for all references to a specific form of Educational Critical
Theory specifically in the United States, that explains why ECT is capitalized.
