Tag / Critical Thinking

by doctormcgrail

History produces nothing but Barbarism

In a recent video interview for publisher Unherd, Yanis Varoufakis asked the question: “Why is the Left the loser of history?’ He went on to argue that the Left failed to “take its opportunity” in the wake of the crisis of capitalism in 2008. Consequently, the ground remained wide-open, only to be filled by the politics of the Far Right.

Of course, since the Left failed in its historic duty to take up the reigns of ‘power’, it has the unenviable position of remaining religiously pure and untainted as the rightful and righteous outcome of ‘history’. It can live for another day, though such a position leads to the inevitable question, given there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ sides of history, of ‘why, so far, has the Right always ended up as the victor of history?’

There is a deeper question here: ‘What is history?’

To ‘Left revolutionaries’, Rosa Luxembourg is famous for stating that ‘the’ class struggle will end in either “Socialism or Barbarism”. The openness of the ‘choice’ with which she confronted her comrades indicates Luxembourg did not see ‘socialism’ as an automatic outcome of the ‘historical process’. But her statement does leave two interpretations: (1) that ‘socialism’ is one possible outcome of ‘the historical process’ (for Varoufakis, socialism can be ‘the victor’), and, alternately, (2) that human action – struggle – is the means by which to avoid the inevitable barbarism that ‘the historical process’ will produce (so, ‘socialism’ can never be ‘the victor’ of a socio-historical process humanity must struggle against).

Following the latter interpretation, a key question is ‘what form should the required struggle take?’ Well, aiming to take up the reigns of political ‘power’ (electoral politics; state capture, Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Bolshevism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Black Power, and Matriarchy) has been tried on numerous occasions. Luxembourg was murdered in 1919, so didn’t live to see the historical outcome of ‘actually existing socialism’.

That is, Varoufakis, no matter how he, himself, sees the world, or understands contemporary ‘history’, needs to deal with the fact that for many people, in certain places and times, socialism has been ‘the victor of history’ and has done nothing but produce barbarism. When socialism has been ‘the victor of history’ then, to change Luxembourg’s quotation: Socialism becomes Barbarism! To the ‘victors’ the spoils.

What has Varoufakis missed?

Varoufakis clearly understands ‘socialism’ to be part and parcel of the historical process – it is a component of the current system which can ‘guide’ history towards a positive outcome. This ‘positivity’ is a theoretical descendant of early utopian socialists (heavily criticised by Marx) such as John Bray and Proudhon – who believed in nationalised banks and ‘fair’ labour exchanges on the basis (as Bonefeld, 2023 puts it) that they could get rid of ‘the capitalist’ but keep ‘capital’ (i.e., the waged labour relationship or social form).

Incidentally, I find Varoufakis’ coining of the ‘concept’ technofeudalism very confusing – a jumble of definitions and meanings. By ‘feudalism’ he appears to serfdom (in a similar way as Hayek referred to ‘The Road to Serfdom’). But this forgets that the tech-bros’ goal is to produce ‘surplus value’ and NOT garner tribune (rents/taxes) under a system of ‘extra-economic’ devine-rights (imposed by ‘direct’ violence). In short, Greece had a Finance Minister who never really understood ‘capitalism’ (conceptually nor practically).

I surmise that Varoufakis has never read the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists (Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno), or, if he has, he hasn’t understood them. Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History reminds us that the point of history is to break with it, not “swim” with its tide. Rather, the struggle is to bring the historical process to a ‘stop’ (to serve the needs of the present) and not drive history to its ‘completion’ (towards some Messianic ‘vision’). Adorno brilliantly sums the same point up: “There is a history which leads from the slingshot to the atom bomb, but not one that goes from barbarism to humanity”.

History is on the wrong side of class struggle – it is a process which runs against the presently-existing needs of humanity. Rather, history (the perpetuation of tradition) is an accumulating “nightmare” which weighs heavily on the “brains of the living” (Marx from 18th Brumaire), compelling them forward on grounds of ‘lack of alternative’. The struggle is to wake up and leave the nightmare; not stay in it to find out who will be ‘victors’. If we stay in it (do not wake up) and keep ‘falling’, then the urban myth tells us there will be just one outcome: Thump!

Notes: The featured image is from a photo of holiday postcards I took in a museum – I’ve entitled it ‘History Sails Forward’. It’s an image captured from ‘the past’, held within a time-capsule.

References:

Bonefeld, W. (2023) A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation London: Routledge.

by doctormcgrail

On Becoming a Critical Thinker?

There are many courses within higher education (HE) which claim to turn students into “critical thinkers”.  The focus is on skills and techniques students can learn, adopt, or adapt such that they “become” a critical thinker, as if such a designation (or identification) was a personal possession and/or that the individual student’s transformation, chrysalis and butterfly like, could be “embodied” – the action of perpetual “critical critic” (Marx – marginal notes to The German Ideology) being captured by the learner.

What such an approach to ‘critical thinking’ forgets is the extent to which criticism is a social act (and event), and not a personal outcome.  Hence, if primacy for the ability to criticise is given to the pertaining social conditions (including individual actions interacting, not simply ‘determinist’ structures) to what extent will any adopter (learner) of critical abilities and skills lose these capacities with changes in their social surroundings, such as ‘leaving university’?

Take a student coming to university from a culture, family, or society ‘A’, where criticism is frowned upon and suppressed (internally as much as externally to the individual).  Upon arrival at university in culture / society ‘B’, they find themselves in a social setting where criticism is encouraged and allowed to flourish.  The student learns techniques and skills of interpretation, contrast, hermeneutics, statistical analysis, or research which enables them to emulate the activities associated with being a “critical thinker”.  By the end of their time at university they have ‘become’ a critical thinker, or at least it seems that way.

But then the student moves back to culture / society ‘B’ (or family context) or onwards to culture ‘C’ (the waged hierarchical workplace) where criticism is limited, disallowed, and even protected against (in some settings) by using non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).  Soon enough the skills of ‘critical thinking’ may be abandoned or left behind!  The ‘learner’ unlearns what they were able to use in the ‘freer’ culture and may no longer ‘be’ or remain a critical thinker.

Is it arrogant of further and higher education institutions and their teachers to ‘think’ that they can turn students into perpetual motion ‘critical thinkers’ based on the mediation / transference of not just ‘critical’ techniques, skills, and abilities (on a ‘banking model’ basis – Freire, 1970) but upon temporary experience of a rather unusual or atypical environment?

Or, to what extent can individual (knowledge-embodied) students carry over and inculcate the practices of the university (as a temporal suppression of commercial ‘pressure’) into wider society and/or their culture ‘A’?  Certainly, the ‘belief’ system of so-called Western liberalism, focused on the individual learner as scholastic commodity, has held dearly to the latter conception as a core method of colonisation (distribution of the ‘learned’) for more than 200 years.

Considering these questions, perhaps it is not the educator who imparts ‘critical thinking’ as a technique, but the forms of social relation the individual ‘learner’ moves between and negotiates which either promotes or denies critical thinking’s very possibility.  Educators need to keep this in mind and, as bell hooks might remind us, reflect on how their actions are changing the social world (or not) rather than how their lesson is changing their ‘students’.

References:

Freire, P. (1970) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. [Penguin Classics]. London: Penguin Books.