Class, Capitalism and Inequality: Schooling and Education in Neo-Liberal, Neoconservative and Neo- Fascist COVID Times: A Classical Marxist Critical Analysis and Activist Programme

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a particular group in capitalist society that is disabled, demeaned and denied by capitalism itself, through processes of economic exploitation, systematic and systemic class exclusion, and discrimination/ prejudice- that is- the working class. In doing so I recognise that the working class (defined as all those who sell their/ our labour power) is segmented horizontally into `layers', or strata (for example, the dispossessed, unemployed, unskilled, though to the supervisory. managerial level/ stratum) and also vertically, for example, by `race' and by gender, with particular ethnic groups, and women in general, disabled and oppressed and exploited to a greater degree than their/ our white, male sisters and brothers). Analysing from a Classical Marxist perspective I address the structures of the capitalist state through which this exclusion and 'subalternising' is imposed, through formal state structures such as education, media, the panoply of state force and class law, as well as through the material power of the capitalist class, expressed through, for example, wage suppression and enforced immiseration of the majority of the working class. In doing so I address two types of neo-Marxist analysis- 'Structuralist neo-Marxism' and 'Culturalist neo-Marxism', and the dialectical relationship between them. They differ on such matters as the degree of `relative autonomy' for resistant agency, the relative impact and import of cultural-ideological as against structural- material analysis, and the salience or not of social class analysis, the Capital-Labour relation, vis-a vis other forms of oppression such as `race, and gender', and their implications for political resistance and organisation at the cultural-ideological level and at the level of power, the material power to reform and revolutionise economic and social relations of Capital. I propose an activist programme of resistance at two levels. Firstly, societal level, looking at Marxists such as Marx and Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and the dialectical relationship between Reform and Revolution. Secondly, at the level of Education, both formal and informal (through social movements, political parties, trade unions, through public pedagogy for example). Within the formal education structures, I advance specific proposals regarding schooling and teacher education. This is a panoptic paper- the issues above are linked in terms of Classical Marxist analysis of capitalism, class exploitation and oppression, and the implications of such analysis for the praxis and politics of resistance.