The Work of Power and the Power of Work: Teaching for Class Consciousness in the Neo-Liberal Age

Abstract

As workers throughout the globe struggle to gain control over the conditions in which they labor as well as the means by which capital is produced, the importance of understanding class struggle, class formation and class consciousness as they relate to education and schooling takes on a new urgency. In the early part of the twenty-first century, neo-liberal ideology persists in normalizing relations of capital, just as contemporary educational theory has tended to subrogate class struggle for social movement. As such, the category of class as a potent historical actor with specific temporal qualities suffers for legitimacy in an age characterized by end-of-history prophets and profiteers; ‘bio-identity’ movements; neo-corporate hegemony; quasi-sovereign nation-states; global financiers monetarily and ideologically supported by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization; increasing local and global disparities between wealth and poverty; and violence. A more comprehensive understanding of social class and education will not eradicate or transform all of these social realities. However, by erasing class as a historical actor, social and educational theorists as well as other political workers miss significant pedagogical opportunities to heighten class consciousness, create class formations, and enliven class struggle so that the future has an opportunity to become something other than what the present suggests it will be. But in an age characterized by a fear of freedom, radicalizing our thinking is a necessary step in imagining the possibility of collective struggle over a future that has yet to be determined.