REJOINDER

Let Them Blister Paint:

Response to Rebecca Martusewicz
PETER MCLAREN
University of California

Rebecca Martusewicz has decamped from her role as editor, disported herself
among the protagonists in what is increasingly looking like a revanchist battleground, and intoned her commentary with poise and brio and an obvious (if not excessively displayed) gift for vituperation in her spirited defense of the work of C.
A. Bowers against claims made by me and Donna Houston. She is clearly
well-versed in the corpus of Bowers thoughtso well-versed that she apparently
finds little or no problems with it. Hence, her cavalcade of objections to my work
and that of Professor Houston comes as no surprise.
Defending Bowers with an intimate knowledge of his work against her limited
knowledge of my work and that of Professor Houston (outside of the original
Houston/McLaren essay and our joint response to Bowers published in the pages
of Educational Studies), our arguments served little more than a foil for praising
the work of her aggrieved, besieged, and increasingly indurate mentor whose storied ability to alienate readers with pestiferous prose has earned him both widespread admiration obloquy in certain academic circles.
Martusewiczs traducing of Marxism in general and her ignorance of the Marxist
humanism that informs my work is evident in the manner in which she implies that
critical pedagogy does not support indigenous knowledges, or is unsympathetic to
the work of indigenous communities such as the Zapatistas or to groups that adopt an
antivanguard stance (I wrote extensively in support of the Zapatistas in Che
Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution, 2000). For instance, when
Martusewicz cited examples of indigenous communities and other groups and their
efforts at resistance and revitalization, enacting love and kinship in all sorts of ways
and via all sorts of cosmologies, she implied that somehow Marxists such as myself
(a Marxist humanist) would find such efforts merely romantic. A clever rhetorical
move on Professor Martusewiczs part, but perilously removed from the truth. Like
that of her mentors, Matusewiczs characterization of the Marxist humanism that undergirds my work has deliquesced into a fetid swamp of misperceptions

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It was not hard to tell where Martusewiczs was heading after she labeled one of
our comments an appalling quip while at the same time defending the vitriol
heaped by Bowers on the practitioners of critical pedagogy as merely a case of
Bowers being direct. She romanticizes such directness by her obvious appreciation for Bowers ability to verbally blister paint and by describing Bowers as someone who, indurated by bitter rejection and exiled from the precincts of academic respectability, occupies a rara avis among educatorsthat of a lone ranger within
education (say, speaking of a choice of metaphors, isnt she referring to the guy in the
white suit and mask who has an Indian sidekick named Tonto?).
It has been my position that (using the case of Bowers as but one example) we
need to be careful around those who criticize others for not being sufficiently decolonized. After all, the most self-identified anticolonialists have often been
shown to recuperate colonialist tropes in registers that escape even their own best
Bateson-powered efforts, a claim I have made elsewhere but wont rehearse here
(see Hill, McLaren, Cole, and Rikowski 2002, Marxism Against Postmodernism in
Educational Theory), just as I dont believe it is the appropriate time to rehearse in
these pages my own take on the Marx/Bakunin debate (which differs substantially
from that of Professor Martusewicz).
I can certainly appreciate the emphasis Martusewicz places on
nonhierarchical difference. And while it would be a decidedly good thing if the
work of Deleuze, Spinoza, and Stephen Pepper (and I dare say Chet Bowers)
were more familiar to educators, it is also important to recognize that in capitalist societies, difference created at the level of everyday life is not always produced within nonhierarchical relations of equality but is often structured within
violent dependent hierarchies. Just as it is important to recognize that the struggle against capitalist society will not be won by displacing a historical materialist understanding of the world (that accords labor primacy over the metaphors
we live by), or by replacing transnational, antiracist, anti-imperialist and gender-balanced struggle with a micropolitics built around anti-essentialism, identity politics, and epistemological awareness. The revolutionary critical pedagogy
I have tried to develop with others takes the position that micropolitics is always
linked to an underlying global logic of production and that the difference that
makes a difference in capitalist societies is regrettably that which is produced in
the crucible of the global division of laborthe results of which have devastated
communities and groups throughout the world.
In this regard, I found the following line by Martusewicz to be especially telling: To argue that we should pay attention to these efforts [the work of eco-justice teacher educators and community members engaged in community building
efforts through the exchange of intergenerational knowledge] is not to argue that
these people are somehow untouched by the monetized culture or that we will
stop capitalism in this way. This is precisely why Marxist scholarship is so crucial. While admittedly it is important to acknowledge, to take seriously, and to

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learn from the work of people who engage in ways of seeing and speaking,
skills and traditions considered low-status knowledge it is also important to engage in internationalist efforts to resist capitalist exploitation and to struggle for
a socialist future.
Paulo Freires challenge was to call on people in different communities to reinvent his work within the contextual specificity and conjunctural embeddedness of
their own geographical, cultural, and subjective location. Those communities of
struggle that I have been familiar with over the years who have taken seriously
Freires challenge of reinventing his work can function in the interests of justice
and peace without Chet Bowers explaining Freires so-called industrial metaphors
to them (which is not to say they wouldnt learn something useful). Supporters of
the Bolivarian revolution that I met recently in Caracas and Barinas, Venezuela,
looked to Freires work not as a cultural invasion but a dialogue of solidarity. However, these various Freirean activist communities are, in Bowers view, supposed to
be so incommensurable that when they adopt a common vision that extends beyond their own geographical, linguistic, or bioregional borders, they are committing a cardinal sin. Gathering from what I read in their respective responses,
Martusewicz and Bowers would only see these communities energized by critical
pedagogy as operating under a gross deception, a swindle of the colonizer whose
practitioners are mulcting aggrieved communities and leading their biddable protagonists into a stygian domain of smoke and shadows, placing them in need of rescue by the supernal force of a Chet Bowers on a white horse (Hi-O Silver!) with
Steps to the Ecology of Mind stuffed snuggly into his saddlebags. This is because
these unwitting souls are operating from a position of (brace your self, I am going
to utter the demon word)universality. Bowers condemns such a move because he
supposes that since the idea of universality has often been used in the service of the
colonizer, everything must accordingly be wrong with it and it must perforce be
jettisoned into the rag and bone shop of failed revolutions. On this point, I am with
Aijaz Ahmad when he says
Contrary to prevailing fashion, I am a shameless advocate of the idea of universality. This is so despite the fact that colonialism has been intrinsic to the kind of
universality that we have had so far and that the only universal civilization that
exists today is the capitalist civilization. I think that human beings are perfectly
capable of waking up to the barbarities of this civilization and making a far better
universalityfor which my word continues to be socialism, but you are welcome to use some other word so long as you mean the same thing. (1997, 57)

The revolutionary critical pedagogy that I have been developing does not adopt
uncritically the Western bourgeois character of Enlightenment universalism but
arches toward an open universality based on a dialogue of cultures, what I have
called elsewhere an arch of social dreaming and most recently socialism.

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What I would like to emphasize in closing is that critical pedagogy and indigenous pedagogy can find many points of commonality and political solidarity, and
this has been illustrated with admirable power and insight in Sandy Grandes
(2004) brilliant work, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political
Thought.
Clearly, critical pedagogy has been, is presently, and in the future should be
open to learn from those who hold diverse views and who operate from different
cosmologies and employ different knowledges. And there is plenty of room for
Chet Bowers to sit at the table and present his views and arguments (as long as he
removes his Stetson hat and promises not to blister the mahogany finish). There is a
lot we can learn from each other.
To end my commentary on a note of supplication, I quote from a chapter in Capitalists and Conquerors:
Our discourse of critical pedagogy must shift into another register, forming itself around new axes of commitment and solidarity and understanding. If it is to
open up possibilities in the world beyond the scope of preexisting conditions
and commonsense assumptions, it needs to confront the issue not of how to address the exploited but how they can address us; not how to create a discourse of
desire to grant the Other recognition, but rather of how to respond to challenges
that the Other has posed to the politics of what we regard as recognition. We need
to be oriented to the world of the Other not in order that the Other recognize us in
terms that we provide, but in order to express and disclose what is at stake in the
terms that we use in the dialogue between us. (McLaren and Jaramillo 2005,
323324)

References
Ahmad, Aijaz. 1997. Culture, Nationalism, and the Role of Intellectuals: An Interview
Conducted by Erika Repov and Nikolai Jeffs. In In Defense of History: Marxism and
the Postmodern Agenda, edited by Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster,
5164. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Hill, Dave, McLaren, Peter, Cole, Mike, and Glenn Rikowski, eds. Marxism Against
Postmoderism in Educational Theory. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2002.
McLaren, Peter, and Nathalia E. Jaramillo. (2005). Gods Cowboy Warrior: Christianity,
Globalization, and the False Prophets of Imperialism. In Capitalists and Conquerors: A
Critical Pedagogy Against Empire, edited by Peter McLaren, 261333. Lanham, Md.:
Rowman and Littlefield.
McLaren, Peter. 2000. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution.
Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
Grande, Sandy. 2004. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought.
Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.