Abstract
Citing an ancient Chinese curse, Immanuel Wallerstein (1998) frequently notes, in reference to our historical world-system and its structures of knowledge, that we are condemned to live in interesting times. Our times are indeed interesting in multiple and complex ways, as could perhaps be claimed at all times. Into the second decade of the twenty-first century, analysts like Wallerstein argue that we have, for some time, been living in world-system defining times, with heightened opportunities to influence the course of the current system’s transformation towards an uncertain alternative. Žižek (2011) concurs, asserting that ‘we are entering a new period in which the economic crisis has become permanent, simply a way of life’, coupled with multiple crises that ‘occur at both extremes of life – ecology (natural externality) and pure financial speculation – not at the core of the productive process’ (403). What Wallerstein, Žižek and other theorists have in common is their elaboration of distinctive challenges that confront global capitalism in the twenty-first century, challenges that some argue defy resolution without disrupting capitalism’s essential operating principle of the endless accumulation of capital (see, e.g. Li 2008; Wallerstein 2011a). In this renewed critique of contemporary capitalism, Alain Badiou (2008) has been central in promoting renewed discussion about the idea of communism, its historical and contemporary meanings (see also Douzinas and Žižek 2010). For Badiou (2008), the communist hypothesis for contemporary times insists that ‘a different collective organisation is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour’ (35). These challenges and possibilities open new spaces for rethinking, imagining and theorising alternatives.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
Carlos Casteñada may be described as a Latin American equivalent of Fukuyama (see Casteñada 1993).
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- 5.
We are critical of the term ‘universal access’, since it only guarantees access, but not the completion of a high quality primary schooling.
- 6.
UNESCO’s (2011) report notes that ‘there is still a very large gap between the Education for All goals set in 2000 and the limited advances that have been made’ (1), while a 2010 MDG Fact Sheet observed that ‘the pace of progress is insufficient to ensure that, by 2015, all girls and boys complete a full course of primary schooling’
(see http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/MDG_FS_2_EN.pdf).
- 7.
See UNESCO (2011).
- 8.
Dewey visited the Soviet Union during these times repeatedly and advocated this type of education that strove to raise free humans through the project method, coupled with social transformation that could make this freedom possible. He believed that without social transformation this form of progressive education could not be achieved (Sáska 2006). Moreover, this educational philosophy of ‘free education’ and the ‘waning of school’ mirrored the ideal discussed by Lenin in State and Revolution about the ‘waning of state’.
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Griffiths, T.G., Millei, Z. (2012). Introduction: Discovering and Negotiating Socialist Educational Logics Under Post-socialist Conditions. In: Griffiths, T., Millei, Z. (eds) Logics of Socialist Education. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4728-9_1
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