Pedagogical pseudo-Leftism

Gerd Altmann – Pixabay

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Andreu Navarra

Klaus Dörre, Professor of Labour, Industrial and Economic Sociology at the University of Jena, published in 2023 the Spanish edition of his article “Democracia en vez de capitalismo, o: ¡Que expropien a Zuckerberg!”, included in the collective volume ¿Qué falla en la democracia? (edited by Hanna Ketterer and Karina Becker, Barcelona, Herder; translation by Alberto Ciria). For some time now I have lived with the feeling of being surrounded either by idiots or hypocrites (or hypocritical idiots—a category in its own right) who combine two essential traits: (1) they champion deconstructive ideas half a century old, and (2) they present themselves as unequivocally progressive personalities, though I rather suspect they’re hiding something… Is it a glaring ignorance of what the left actually is beyond the Pyrenees? Or perhaps an even broader ignorance—a condition of cultivated illiteracy— that leads them to embrace an ideology that may look neutral—or even vaguely globalist—on the surface, yet is in truth little more than a protean populism: ever-shifting, as malleable as it is mucilaginous, tailored to whatever audience happens to be in front of it. A pleasant, smiley populism, yes—but one that is, at heart, profoundly reactionary.

To begin with, the left must be disagreeable—by which I mean, inconvenient. In that sense, Dörre’s article is a goldmine of data and arguments with which to unmask our own brand of pseudo-leftism, so misplaced, so well-intentioned and yet, ultimately, so devastating through sheer dereliction. Let us take a look. This German thinker writes that “the widely touted claim that there is a crisis of democracy in a normative sense is doubtful, since at the very least it subliminally suggests that democratic institutions and procedures are no longer up to the new social challenges. But asserting this is also problematic from an analytical point of view. There is no crisis of democracy. What is happening is rather that democracy as a form of government is being sacrificed on the altar of an expansionist capitalism that, in order to safeguard itself, increasingly needs to resort to authoritarian practices”.

Schooling, as everyone knows perfectly well, is one of the central democratic institutions. When the pedagogists say it is “not up to the task”, or brand it as an authoritarian relic of pre-constitutional times, what they are really recommending is its liquidation—or at the very least a radical reconversion. They are collaborating with irrationalist, vitalist, deregulatory forces entirely alien to academic purposes, forces that are using them to carry out a profound restructuring of our society and of the world of work. A restructuring that has already seeped into legal texts, and which certainly does not answer to any republican ideal of economic levelling. So let us see what truly underpins today’s pedagogist revolutionism. Dörre is highly expressive in spelling out what is happening to us: “The smart-technology consortia are causing, through their business practices, a slow and discreet yet steadily advancing destruction of democratic public spheres”; and a little further on he adds: “My thesis is that democracy—originally a distinct sphere, yet one relatively compatible with market expansion and capital accumulation—has now become an object of financial capitalism’s appropriations”. His conclusion is stark: “These cases reveal that we are witnessing an evolution towards non-democratic systems that are nonetheless democratically legitimised”. What Steven Forti calls “electoral autocracies” in his book Democracias en extinción (Siglo XXI, 2024).

The pedagogists are serving a very specific reconversion: the shift from a democracy buttressed by a welfare state to an Electoral Autocracy that places macroeconomic objectives above any kind of ethical, philosophical or political consideration. All of this is being done quite consciously, in broad daylight, without the slightest attempt at disguise or even a token blink. We have all seen them defend the indiscriminate use of AI and every conceivable external commercial product or licence; we all know how the bulk of public money is being siphoned away into private technocracy; and all this has been trumpeted as an achievement to be proud of in the major media outlets. There is no conspiracy here, no hidden agenda: everything is being done in plain sight.

Just as Dörre argues that there is no crisis of democracy but rather an assault by the markets, my own hypothesis is that official pedagogism is one of the essential tools enabling that assault on open democracy to succeed. Are not our educational institutions perfect examples of post-democratic democracies—micro-Leviathans where once decisions were made collectively but where today the most brute and authoritarian technocracy calls the shots?

The bureaucratisation of pedagogy has allowed them to cancel any form of internal dissent. A little further on we reach the key to the entire edifice. Our sociologist writes that “both from the point of view of the history of ideas and in institutional terms, democracies rest upon the confluence of at least two traditional lines: on the one hand, liberalism, with its emphasis on liberty and pluralism; on the other, a republican egalitarianism that prioritises equality and popular sovereignty. Each places a very different accent within the programme of the bourgeois revolution”. Here lies the heart of our collective shipwreck: we have forgotten the essential half that gave meaning to our democratic school. We have erased its republican philosophy—that is, the whole framework of egalitarian ideals that once balanced the need for internal pluralism. Technocratic autocracies and oligarchies may go as far as they wish in matters of internal “pluralism” or diversity, but they cannot allow public rents to slip through their fingers if they wish to keep expanding. Put differently, they may tolerate or even verbally promote diversity, but they can in no way permit open discussion of money flows or social class.

We have reduced the left to a bundle of orthodox sermons indistinguishable from those of liberal conservatism, and for this very reason our school neither teaches nor provides the essential elements for forming an informed, imaginative, combative—or, as Dörre would have it, “antagonistic”—citizenry. A citizenry that would demand the immediate democratisation of the economy—in other words, a renewed regulation of financial transactions.

Without a clear notion of economic citizenship and without genuinely universal access to higher education, our educational system is nothing but a caricature of the vast inequality-producing machine that the United States has become. Against this backdrop of the rapid discrediting of democratic institutions, the fact that pedagogism—this fiction of social progress—still enjoys institutional prestige is, to my mind, the most astonishing thing of all.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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