Our critique is prior---correct diagnosis of the origins of oppression is key to creating new social relations.

McLaren: Mitja, I like the way that you framed that question. The obviousness of conservative culture is precisely why it is so hidden from view. Much like those who controlled the paradis articificels of everyday life in the film, The Truman Show. I am struck each day by the manner in which predatory capitalism anticipates forgetfulness, nourishes social amnesia, smoothes the pillows of finality, and paves the world with a sense of inevitability and sameness. I am depressingly impressed by what a formidable opponent it has proven to be, how it fatally denies the full development of our human capacities, and inures us to the immutability of social life. In other words, it naturalizes us to the idea that capital is the best of all possible worlds, that it may not be perfect, but it certainly is preferable to socialism and communism. Many leftists have unwittingly become apologists for capitalist relations of domination because they are overburdened by the seeming inability of North Americans to imagine a world in which capital did not reign supreme. To address this situation, I have turned to critical pedagogy

Mitja: You are very much identified with the field of critical pedagogy. How would you define critical pedagogy? What is your position within this field today?

McLaren: As you know, Mitja, critical pedagogy has been a central liberatory current in education of the last two decades. Critical pedagogy has served as a form of struggle within and against the social norms and forces that structure the schooling process. Most approaches to critical pedagogy are limited to disturbing the foundations upon which bourgeois knowledge is built, placing the term ‘schooling’ itself under scrutiny. Questions that arise in critical pedagogy often have to do with the relationship among schooling and the broader array of publics constructed by the marketplace and brought about by the secularization and the internationalization of the politics of consumption. In other words, critical pedagogy most often deals with cultural manifestations of capital, and the norms and formations that are engendered by means of relations of exchange. This is a good strategy as far as it goes. However, the revolutionary pedagogy that I advocate, that I have built from the roots of Freire’s and Marx’s work and the work of many others, such as the great revolutionary Che Guevara, involves the uprooting of these seeds of naturalization – planted through the reification of social relations and the subsumption of difference to identity by means of the law of value – and this means undressing the exploitative, sexist, racist, and homophobic dimensions of contemporary capitalist society. But it also means more than simply ‘uncovering’ these relations, or laying them bare in all of their ideological nakedness. It stipulates – and here it is important not to mince words – the total uprooting of class society in all of its disabling manifestations. Revolutionary pedagogy refers to taking an active part in a total social revolution, one in which acting and knowing are indelibly fused such that the object of knowledge is irrevocably shaped by the very act of its being contemplated. That is, the very act of contemplation (I need to emphasize that this act of contemplation is collective and dialogical) shapes – and is shaped by – the object under investigation. The knowers are shaped – through dialogue – by the known. Revolutionary pedagogy attempts to produce an excess of consciousness over and above our conditional or naturalized consciousness, to create, as it were, an overflow that outruns the historical conditions that enframe it and that seek to anchor it, so that we might free our thought and, by extension, our everyday social practices from its rootedness in the very material conditions that enable thinking and social activity to occur in the first place. In other words, revolutionary pedagogy teaches us that we need not accommodate ourselves to the permanence of the capitalist law of value. In fact, it reveals to us how we can begin to think of continuing Marx’s struggle for a revolution in permanence. A number of thinkers have helped to unchain the revolutionary implications of Freire’s thought in this regard – Donaldo Macedo, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, Peter Mayo, among others. I have attempted to do this by iterating the protean potential of his work for social revolution and not just the democratizing of capitalist social relations. So much contemporary work on Freire has inflated its coinage for transforming classroom practices but devalued its potential for revolutionary social change outside of the classroom in the wider society. Revolutionary pedagogy requires a dialectical understanding of global capitalist exploitation. Freire is often brought in to illuminate debates over school reform that are generally structured around the conceit of a dialogue over equality of opportunity, which rarely go beyond momentous renunciations of corporatism or teeth-rattling denunciations of privatization. But such debates studiously ignore the key contradictions to which history has given rise – those between labor and capital. Such debates are engineered in the United States to avoid addressing these contradictions.

Mitja: What do you see as the most important challenge in the future for educational researchers?

McLaren: The key to see beyond the choir of invisibilities that envelope us, and to identify how current calls for establishing democracy are little more than half-way house policies, a smokescreen for neo-liberalism and for making capitalism governable and regulated – a “stakeholder” capitalism if you will. I do not believe such a capitalism will work, nor am I in favor of market socialism. We need to chart out a type of positive humanism that can ground a genuine socialist democracy without market relations, a Marxist humanism that can lead to a transcendence of alienated labor. Following Marx, Eagleton claims that we are free when, like artists, we produce without the goad of physical necessity; and it is this nature which for Marx is the essence of all individuals. Transforming the rituals of schooling can only go so far, since these rituals are embedded in capitalist social relations and the law of value. There are signs that research in the social sciences might be going through a sea-shift of transformation. I think we need to take the focus away from how individual identities are commodified in postmodern consumer spaces, and put more emphasis on creating possibilities for a radical reconstitution of society. I like the new public role of Pierre Bourdieu – a role that sees him taking his politics into the streets and factories of France, fighting the structural injustices and economic instabilities brought about by capitalism and neo-liberalism – fighting what, in effect, are nothing short of totalitarian practices that are facilitating the exploitation of the world’s workers. Bourdieu realizes that we haven’t exhausted all the alternatives to capitalism. If that is the case, we need, as researchers, to bring our work to bear on the seeking out of new social relations around which everyday life can be productively and creatively organized. In my view, this is social science – and politics – the way it should be practiced.