Table Of ContentCapitalism, Pedagogy, and the
Politics of Being
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Capitalism, Pedagogy, and the
Politics of Being
Noah De Lissovoy
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
Part I The Field of Capital
1 Education and the Clotting of Capital 11
2 Toward a Decolonial Analytic of Capital 30
Part II Race, Repression, and Critical Pedagogy
3 Race, Reform, and Neoliberalism’s Elite Rationale 51
4 Repression, Violation, and Education 69
5 Critical Pedagogy and a Generative Thematics of the Global 91
Part III Practicing Emancipation
6 Pedagogy of the Anxious 117
7 Constituent Power, Ethics, and Democratic Education 139
8 Notes for a Revolutionary Curriculum 156
References 175
Index 190
Acknowledgments
I want to acknowledge everyone for surviving and struggling through crisis,
dislocation, and repression. These have been tough years. I am grateful for the
love and solidarity of family, friends, and colleagues.
Thanks to my immediate family, Arcelia, Caleb, and Lali, for your light and
love every day. Thanks also to my parents, Sue and Pete, and my brother, Sandy,
for everything.
Scholarship is always a collective project; our individual contributions come
out of conversations that nurture them. So many comrades and colleagues have
helped me, through their work, the discussions that we have had, and their
friendship, to come to the understandings I offer in this book. I am grateful
to Luis Urrieta, Alex Means, Anthony Brown, Keffrelyn Brown, Juan Carrillo,
Olmo Fregoso Bailón, Graham Slater, Wayne Au, Ken Saltman, Sandy Grande,
Dan Heiman, Jennifer Keys Adair, Fikile Nxumalo, Claudia Cervantes-Soon,
Ramón Martínez, Sepehr Vakil, Greg Bourassa, Kevin Lam, Richard Kahn,
Cinthia Salinas, José García, Jeannette Alarcón, Clayton Pierce, Blanca Caldas
Chumbes, David Hursh, Tyson Lewis, Derek Ford, Sheila Macrine, Molly Wiebe,
and Frank Margonis, among others. Thanks as well, for their generous support,
to Peter McLaren, Angela Valenzuela, Antonia Darder, Bill Schubert, Ming Fang
He, and Wayne Ross.
I also want to extend thanks to the brilliant students I work with in the
Cultural Studies in Education Program and the Department of Curriculum and
Instruction, including Courtney Cook, Alex Armonda, Adam Martinez, Celine
Vallejo, Nathaly Batista-Morales, Pablo Montes, Judith Landeros, Beth Link, and
all the students in the program and beyond.
I am deeply grateful for the steadfast support of my editor at Bloomsbury,
Mark Richardson, as well as to Evangeline Stanford. Your constant enthusiasm
has meant so much throughout my work on this project.
Finally, I am grateful for permission to revise the following essays for
this volume: “Value and Violation: Toward a Decolonial Analytic of Capital”
(Radical Philosophy Review 21(2), 2018), “The Violence of Compassion:
Education Reform, Race, and Neoliberalism’s Elite Rationale” (in K. Saltman
Acknowledgments vii
& A. Means, Eds., Handbook of Global Educational Reform, Wiley-Blackwell,
2019), “Pedagogy of the Anxious: Rethinking Critical Pedagogy in the Context
of Neoliberal Autonomy and Responsibilization” (Journal of Education Policy
33(2), 2018), and “Against Reconciliation: Constituent Power, Ethics, and the
Meaning of Democratic Education” (Power and Education 10(2), 2018).
viii
Introduction
I first learned about the tradition of radical education known as critical pedagogy
when I was a teacher in Los Angeles in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This
approach, which was also a way of seeing the world, was a revelation to me. Based
on an investigation of and challenge to the oppressive “limit-situations” (Freire,
1996) confronting communities, critical pedagogy gave me a framework for
understanding the conditions that my students experienced as well as a context
in which to think about the purpose of education. It also gave me a network
in which to struggle alongside like-minded comrades. The critical roots of this
tradition were connected to political and philosophical orientations that I was
already somewhat familiar with—Marxism in particular—and bringing all of
these tools together, it was possible to begin to understand the history unfolding
around me. This was a period of labor militancy in Southern California as well as
a moment of important working-class movements in contexts of immigration,
education, and urban space—movements which immediately opened onto a
global horizon of struggles against the depredations of neoliberal globalization
(NAFTA and its aftermath in particular). Neoliberalism was gathering steam
in education too, as high-stakes standardized testing and scripted curricula
proliferated in the schools. Recognizing that reality was not an indifferent
sedimentation of events but rather the expression of basic class struggles, that
schooling was a crucially contested site within this broad landscape, and that
teaching itself—as pedagogy—was already an enacted ethics and politics (in one
direction or another) gave me a new and transformative perspective on myself,
my students, and the city.
At the same time, for anyone with a progressive or radical outlook in Los
Angeles in that moment, it was clear that struggles around resources, work,
and capitalism itself could not be separated from questions of race and culture.
Racism organized every moment of life in the city, as well as its overall structure
and topography. This racial logic was enforced by the Los Angeles Police
Department, whose terrorism against Black people and other communities of
color was an everyday reality. Anti-immigrant initiatives at the statewide level
were motivated by a deep hostility to Latinx and Indigenous peoples. In education,
