Challenges & Hopes: Multiculturalism as
Revolutionary Praxis

Gustavo E. Fischman interviews Peter McLaren

Multicultural Education. , v. 6 no4 (Summer 1999) p. 32-4 

Gustavo E. Fischman: It is difficult to put a label on your work because you have written in so many different fields, ethnography, literacy, critical pedagogy, educational policy, curriculum, and sociology, but it appears to me that multiculturalism is a topic that crosses almost all your books and articles despite the disciplinary approach that happens to frame your project at any particular time? 

Peter McLaren: That is true. 

Gustavo: Among your many works, I recall four books that have multiculturalism in their title: Multicultural Education and Critical Pedagogy (edited with Christine Sleeter), Critical Multiculturalism (edited with Barry Kanpol), Multiculturalismo Critico, that you did for Cortez Publishers and the Paulo Freire Institute in Sao Paulo, Brasil (and which I understand has a wide readership in Brasil), and your most recent book,
Revolutionary Multiculturalism. There are also other books and several articles of yours that are very prominent in the field of multicultural education: Life in Schools: Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture, and Between Borders (edited with Henry Giroux). 

Peter: Yes, all my books deal to a greater or lesser extent with issues of race class, gender, sexuality, the state, and power and capitalist exploitation. My readers know this and I have been fortunate to be able to publish so much since coming to the United States from Canada in 1985. 

Gustavo: Multicultural education is a vast, complex, and not homogeneous pedagogical movement. Where do you locate your works within the field? 

Peter: I have learned a lot from Jim Cummings, Enrique Trueba, James Banks, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Sonny San Juan, Emily Hicks, Carl Grant, Sonia Nieto, Rudolfo Chavez Chavez, Herman Garcia, Rudy
Torres, David Theo Goldberg, Warren Crinchlow, Cornel West, bell hooks, Cameron McCarthy, Christine Sleeter, Antonia Darder, Joyce King, Donaldo Macedo, Joe Kincheloe, Henry Giroux, and a host of other
scholars and activists. They are superb and committed scholars. What makes my work a bit different is that it is underwritten by a serious critique of global capitalism and works out of a Marxist problematic. 

Some people have accused me of stressing class issues to the exclusion of race, ethnicity, and gender, for instance, because I am a working class white guy from el Norte del Norte (Canada), but quite honestly I do believe that capitalist exploitation is the motor of the kind of systematic, institutionalized racism that has been so perniciously present in Western industrialized and post-industrialized nations. With all of our talk
about racist formations, racialized discourses, binary thinking, Eurocentric tropes and conceits, and floating signifiers (which is fine, as far as sophisticated scholarly exegesis goes) we have forgotten--all too perilously--that racism and sexism are predicated upon the economic exploitation of the many by the few. 

The academy is a vicious and hypocritical place that breeds neoliberals masquerading as leftist multiculturalists and opportunists trying to pass themselves as selfless "solidarists" in the struggle for justice. People working across differences and building alliances are exceptions. Antonia Darder--who has initiated the call for the creation of the California Consortium for Critical Pedagogy--is one of those rare and exceptional scholars. 

Gustavo: As a multiculturalist, how do you come to terms with your own whiteness? 

Peter: My whiteness (and my maleness) is something I cannot escape no matter how hard I try. Early economic hardship cannot eradicate my whiteness because as Mike Dyson notes, there is always a "negative culpability" on the part of whites, in the form of pleasure that some poor whites derive from not
being black. Poor whites (whites in general) still occupy a privileged space on the comparative racial taxonomy. In pursuing these questions, in living my own life as a traitor to whiteness, I cannot become lazy by failing to interrogate the epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions of my own practice. If all whites are racists at some level, then we must struggle to become anti-racist racists. We must always rethink our positionalities, platforms, and affiliations, without defaulting the main game, which is to resist and transform the market system based on the maximization of corporate profits. After all, it was this system that enslaved millions of Africans in the United States and still disproportionately exploits people of color worldwide. 

Of course it is not capitalism alone that achieved this. Exploitation is also made possible by systems of classification that grew out of religion, social and natural sciences frameworks that justified slavery, and other forms of oppression on the basis of the supposedly sacred and/or scientific inferiority of certain groups of people. While battling the leviathan of United States transnational capitalism and its neocolonial
clientele, and the alienation and exploitation that marks so many cultural practices of this society, the struggle ahead must include inventing life forms for ourselves where racism, sexism and homophobia have
no place, where joy and love can flourish, and where we can live unfettered by the determinism of capitalist progress. This is no simple romantic anti-capitalism I am endorsing, but a challenge grounded in the tough task of historical materialist analysis and the imperative of class struggle. 

Gustavo: What you just said reminds me of that in a recent issue of Educational Theory, you were criticized for using a language that includes a clear call for the educational left to rethink class struggle in light of global capitalism. The language seems quite close to traditional Marxists positions and a clear dismissal of identity politics. 

Peter: I am not an old-style manifesto Marxist, as some of my critics in the Educational Theory issue that you mentioned have suggested, nor am I a postmodernist as other people seem to think (possibly because
an article I wrote in 1986 was the first to deal with postmodernism in a U.S. educational journal--so I have been told). I do learn a lot from my critics, but in this case they appeared insistent on reading much into my text that was not there. A deeper and more nuanced reading of my essay would--I hope--reveal the following. I am not against identity politics. After all, as Robin Kelley has so lucidly pointed out, identity politics has always been central to working class movements. It has greatly enriched our conception of
class. We should not forget that African-American social movements have been in solidarity with workers, black male abolitionists supported women suffrage, black radicals a century ago lent a helping hand to Irish self-determination and worked against the Chinese Exclusionary Act. Kelley also notes that in those alliances, gender and class can be conceived as "affiliations" that build unity by supporting other peoples'
struggles. 

My point was that some versions of postmodernist and poststructuralist theorizing tend to ignore the perils of global capitalism and the misery it is creating for so many people throughout the world. My argument is that we need to re-set our sights on anti-capitalist struggle before the noose around our neck is drawn too tightly. I invited readers to see how global capitalism colonizes, commodifies, and fetishizes across race,
class, gender lines. Even though I explicitly stated that class should not be privileged over race, gender, or sexuality--and that the important issue is to understand how capitalism has reterritorialized race, class, and gender formations--some critics saw my latest works as a call for returning to the old days of Bowles and  Gintis, or they claimed, rather ludicrously, that I blamed postmodern theory for the current success of global capitalism! Frankly, I still think we can learn much from the early work of Bowles and Gintis. 

I think that, in general, there are postmodernist educators who will raise an objection to the "subjunctive mode" of my address--the "we should" do this or do that. They are, understandably, concerned that efforts at revolutionary praxis may contain hidden oppressions, or that the cure I propose is perhaps worse than
the disease. But all that they offer in the place of revolutionary praxis is assuming an "ironic mode of address" or recognizing the indeterminacy of agency, or the multiple locations of subjectivity, and so on. 

Well, I would rather build momentum against global exploitation on the basis of provisional directive than on the basis of linguistic indeterminacy, or the announcement of the impossibility of critical pedagogy to contribute to the struggle against exploitation and the process of liberation. I am not saying that the left is
not immune to tragic mistakes, but I prefer a platform to an anti-platform if you are going to attempt an internationalist movement against the powerful global machinery of capital. 

Gustavo: Let me clarify a point here. Are you stipulating a view of liberation that is limited to the Marxist or to a super-conscious revolutionary agent? 

Peter: I think these criticisms are important. But to elaborate my answer to your question, let me say that I believe that the very conceptions available to thought--especially in our educational institutions--are insufficient to teach what it means to live a revolutionary life. One has, in a word, to live it. And to this cause, critical pedagogy attempts to bring the self up against the limits of reason. Let me say that I certainly recognize that freedom is not altogether "free." All concepts of freedom--whether constructed by myself, or
others (Marxists, feminists, environmentalists, and many other committed intellectuals and social movements)--are constrained by the knotted pathways of the psyche, where the machineries of desire (whether they are structured like a language or not I will leave to the Lacanians to answer) wrestle with socially imposed standards and established criteria. 

Critical pedagogy and revolutionary multiculturalism recognize the violence that shadows the modern subject and it does not try to create a calculable, uniform or transparent subject of revolutionary idealism, purged of its inner contradictions. I do not wish to insulate the subject from the process of its own self and
social formation, its genealogy of interiorization. After all, revolutionary multiculturalists need to reflect upon the patriarchal, teleological, and Eurocentric assumptions that shape our standards of freedom. But we should not eliminate the injunction to self-discipline. Resistance at some level needs to be disciplined if it is to have a global sweep. It should be open-ended, too--in other words, it should be combinative. But above
all it should be committed and determined, and not susceptible to giving in to nominal concessions from the capitalist class. 

Gustavo: Peter, you make a distinction between ludic and resistance postmodernists, correct? Not all postmodernist theorizing is capital friendly. 

Peter: Correct. The work of Teresa Ebert has been very helpful in this regard. The distinctions have to do with whether postmodern discourses sufficiently challenge the ruling frameworks of patriarchal capitalism that deploy sexual or racial difference to justify the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Ludic postmodernism basically examines semiosis in a context that does not seriously consider capitalist social
relations of production. Resistance postmodernism is more likely to locate racism and patriarchy beyond the rhetoricization and troping of capitalism and within class, gender, and ethnic divisions of property and struggle over profit and surplus labor. Ludic postmodernism, on the other hand, takes the existing capitalist order to extremes--as if greed and consumerism would somehow secure its transcendence. We need to
ask ourselves how we can sustain unalienated production and reproduction. 

We cannot--we must not--think that equality can occur in our schools or society in general without at once and the same time demanding and participating in political and economic revolution. No sphere of domination must remain unassailed by the project of liberation. We need to remain steadfast, we cannot embark in a flight from being, that is, a flight towards the world of commodities that can only objectify being.
We need to remember that we do not own ourselves, we don't belong only to our selves.

 We belong to being. Because we belong to being, we need not covet the fruits of capital, for they are also the fruits of exploitation. Exploitation violates being. To find our multicultural soul is always an exercise of praxis, not ownership. It is an act conjugated with love in the interests of social justice. I am not trying to be metaphysical here since I connect objectified being with labor, with the laboring and toiling body, with the
alienated worker, with the commodification of labor, with the exploited and the oppressed. 

Gustavo: I think that you agree with the idea that critical pedagogy is not a transparent practice or a set of clear cut guidelines that we can find in a manual. The paradox, however, seems to be that every programmatic attempt to do critical pedagogy must necessarily begin with a position, an action, a positivity, a project, and that inescapably contains some form of exclusion. How, then, can critical pedagogy sustain itself without contradicting its very premises? 

Peter: Critical educators must always ask themselves--without flinching--tough questions: What is the hidden history of otherness contained within our narratives of liberation? Whom do they exclude, marginalize, repress? How can we regather what has been lost and fill the empty space of despair with revolutionary hope? Hope stipulates an Other who stands before us. Where, after all, can we search for a praxis of transformation that emerges from the plasma of revolutionary love, if not in the space of dialogue,
the space of the Other. The many truths that emerge from the history of struggle--spoken to us by Che Guevara, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Malcolm X, Paulo Freire, and others--those truths, however partial, are still valid. The challenge before us, companero, is to create new spaces in which to realize them. This invariably involves class struggle on a global basis. 

I have often asked myself, Gustavo, is liberation the aggregate of infusible yearnings? Yearnings too manifold and incommensurable to bring to the table of freedom? Is liberation from domination an impossibility? Is there some psychological armor that, under capitalism, insulates us from the Other? I believe in the end that there are many different ways for us to become subjects and to resist becoming
objects. One of the key challenges ahead must center around indigenous struggles for liberation, and critical pedagogy has much to learn from these movements, such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Hasta la victoria siempre campanero. 

Gustavo E. Fischman is assistant professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the College of Education,
Arizona State University, Tempe. 

Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium by Peter McLaren
(Boulder, CO: West-view Press, 1997. Five reviews of this book appear on the pages following this
interview.