The Community, Adult and Workers’ Education Chair at the University of Johannesburg asked me to make some closing remarks at its Seminar on Workers’ Education in May. What follows here is a condensed version of my remarks based largely on the interpretations I bring. These are derived from my own experience, which comes from the formative period of the democratic union movement of the 70s. At that time, we did not deal properly with issues relating to social reproduction, and hence with the relationship between organised workers and the working-class communities – except fleetingly. We did not discuss environmental issues or have a deeper analysis of the social relations of knowledge, science, innovation and the democratising of work.
At the seminar, it became clear that there were some fundamental differences in relation to the purposes of workers’ education. These concerned the objectives of education and its relationship to the specific worker constituency; to the orientation to the state and capital, and, very importantly, to the wider communities of the working class, its social movements and organisations. All this will ultimately affect the content of mass-based education programmes for working-class communities. I focused on a few issues, hoping that would be useful for further discussion and debate, especially in the communities, movements and struggles of the working class.
Workers’ education and structural change
To begin with, perhaps the most important thing about education in the struggles of the working class has to do with its location in a political economy which is undergoing huge structural change, driven by the power of globalised corporate, extractivist and militaristic capitalism. It is a political economy shepherded on behalf of capital by complicit states through policies, including privatisation of public goods and cost-recovery, massive public support for corporate enterprises, deindustrialisation and a raft of neoliberal strategies. These fundamental changes in global capitalism are reinforced by the monstrous regimes of trade, debt, finance, exchange and information imposed by deadly militaristic and surveillance systems. We know the cumulative effects of these policies on human and environmental sustainability from the mountain of available data about this.
These changes are a response to the inherent contradictions and unresolvable crises in capitalism, forcing the working class into massive structural fragmentation. We need to examine these more deeply, since we cannot continue to rely on past ways of understanding the relationship between capital, the state and labour. Now, most of the global working class is in precarious, casualised, informal, minimal-rights labour, and expendable. And the state – as we can see from the recent moves to change the law in South Africa– is a key instrument in this. It demands of us that we understand these changes and their effects on both the character of the working class and the theories and practices, organisational forms and strategies for radical working-class education.
Capitalist reproduction
In addition, we must pay more attention to the analysis of how capitalism reproduces itself, beyond the system of production. The production and reproduction of capitalism has its roots in what is called primitive accumulation, characterised by racist slavery, colonisation and conquest and through the exploitation of unpaid household and domestic labour. It is characterised by the separation of exploitative paid labour and unpaid reproductive work. The mode of capitalist reproduction based on household work and care has been neglected in past analyses. This is even though it is key to definitions of the working-class and its struggles and has huge implications for how we understand capitalist work, gender and intersectional issues and a radical feminist critique for organisation.
Although working-class struggles are increasingly projected as struggles over wages and work conditions, they are in fact about the wider social, economic and political struggles of working-class communities. In fact, the problem of patriarchy is also expressed in the division of productive and reproductive labour. We know that it has a long history in human development pre-capitalism (through racist slavery, indenture and feudal relations). This is exacerbated by the forcible reproduction of social relations that are racist and reinforce pre-existing forms of patriarchal relations in the social and family system, bound by unequal work, gendered control and a host of oppressive cultural institutions. These institutions need to be examined openly and frankly, and must be central to any programme of workers’ education, if we are not to reproduce what exists in society. This issue is much more than that of demographic or gendered representation in organisational practices and is central to any critique of contemporary capitalism and the strategies against it.
Who constitutes the working class?
The implication of the above is that the very definition of who constitutes the working class, especially in societies like ours, cannot be read from conventional European definitions of the proletariat. We have used these for a long time because of the major structural and technological changes taking place in the workplace, affecting the very nature of work and capitalist control. It means that we must ask the question “Who constitutes the working class?”
The answer would be obvious to anyone who understands the extensive processes of social fragmentation taking place in the working class through precarity and informalisation, and the large-scale migrations of millions of mainly working-class people who are forced to be on the move. Restricting a definition of the working class to an organised proletariat is simply untenable for the struggle against capitalism. A wider definition of working classes does not reduce the role of workplace trade unions. It requires a proper examination of their limits and the necessity of solidarity and collaboration with other forms of collective organisation, like for casualised workers, and the social and community movements of the working class. A proper conceptualisation of the working class is fundamental to the development of radical social consciousness in working class struggles and is needed to confront the fragmentation of social movements, unions and other organisations in struggle.
Capitalist ideology and the working class
Capitalist production systems produce their own ideology, media, and communication systems, which can overwhelm the working class and its leadership, because they are ubiquitous in the public, private, and social media. They dominate even cultural ideas and substitute these for commercial ones, drown out radical educational ideas by talking about labour markets and reproduce racist, gendered and ethno-nationalist, fascistic ideas. Millions of workers vote for neo-fascist governments throughout the world in the USA and Europe, in India, Argentina, Hungary, West Asia and elsewhere as fascism seeks to take hold, dragging the working classes with it. It is taking root even here in the rise of ethno-nationalist ideas and the support for political Zionism.
We can see how imperialism has given rise to the worst forms of divisive and xenophobic ideas, rampant ethno-nationalism and neo-fascism. Hundreds of thousands of the working class are on the move in Latin America, West Asia and in Africa, and the causal basis of this lies in the interests of transnational capitalist corporations and the states which support them. The Congo, Sudan, Palestine, Haiti, Myanmar, etc, are in fact simply a metaphor for a condition of war against the global poor.
Thus, it is critically important that workers’ education deals with the problems of ideology and culture. In the words of the late, great revolutionary leader José Mujica:
I am not thinking of culture that is sold, like professional music or dance. All that is important, of course, but when I speak of culture, I am referring to human relations, to the set of ideas that govern our relationships without us realising it. It is a set of unspoken values that determines the way in which millions of anonymous people around the world relate to each other.
The working class is up against a deeply entrenched cultural and ideological system that props up the political economy. It is the active but unseen process of winning our consent to an oppressive system that shapes global human social relations, affecting even the survival of all life on this planet. It is about acquiring our consent to a system built on the shameless greed of a tiny minority of individuals and their families, destroying the sovereignty of nations, propagating ideas of racism, patriarchy and hate. It is about subverting all knowledge and learning towards these terrible purposes.
Build organisations of democratic workers’ practice
Regrettably, even workers’ leaders have fallen prey to the terrible ideologies which mask these realities and cause division within working-class communities. Some have consciously collaborated with these processes and have turned working-class communities against the idea that their lives are deeply implicated in the politics of the day. That is why it continues to be critically important that politically conscious members of the working class must continue to construct organisations for democratic worker control and practice, against the pseudo-populist politics of some or other demagogue, or the rhetoric of leaders who actively collaborate with Kapital. And this requires wider forms of social solidarity than the traditional forms of organisation in industrial unions and public employment.
In essence, what is required is an approach to education and learning that can produce radical social consciousness. This is essential both to unmask the extraordinary power of anti-working-class ideas and to create the organisational possibilities, platforms, forums, programmes, systems and practices to advance working-class learning, using radical curricula, languages and socially-oriented pedagogies. And it requires attention to democratic practice, accountability and mandated process for which we have historical experience. The working class cannot rely on a small coterie of leaders with whom the membership does not engage except to receive decisions already made. Workers’ education must support the renewal of the practices of collective and democratic learning for radical social consciousness, if it is not to be left to rummage in the confusing array of lies which the dominant social media and its tonnage of deliberately misleading information propagates to make us active agents in our own oppression. And our own critical media is a fundamental requirement of workers’ consciousness, to oppose the deliberate confusions which colonise our minds and reproduce ideas that stand against the interests of the working classes.
Current initiatives
Against this gloomy picture, we can now see all over the world new and emerging collective forms of organisation, social movements, political, cooperative, cultural and other forms of solidarity being developed. These initiatives include land occupation, the rescue of factories by taking them over, the formation of brigades for social protection in the context of war and occupation, the development of tens of thousands of producer, consumer, service and finance cooperatives globally, massive organisation of gig and platform workers, community food gardens, urban farming collectives, care and service organisations, a vast array of organisations involved in environmental and climate related issues, community health and safety collectives, wealth trusts, stokvels, mutual aid societies and a host of other ‘social’ economies and related initiatives. The global cooperative association alone counts as many as 3 million cooperatives, with as many as 800 million people involved in them, despite all the difficult problems they face under capitalism. And there are discussions about democratising and decommodifying work and its meaning for decarbonising the environment.
Nearly all these activities are self-initiated by communities at a local or regional level, and some are internationally connected. These developments are a response to the polycrisis which faces humanity and the ecological environment. In our own country, there are examples of radical learning available to support the democratising of education and its practical requirements, including the transitional steps towards a post-capitalist and democratic socialist future.
These steps can be developed cumulatively to plant the seeds of alternative approaches, through democratic organisation and mobilisation on specific local and national issues. Democratic socialist approaches can be used to engage with the contradictory spaces which capitalism itself produces to plant the seeds of opposition to it. Concrete practice is a spur to imaginative innovation to face seemingly intractable barriers. The very act of doing is a process of learning about alternative possibilities – alternatives that may not be envisaged from the beginning, but which unfold in the process of active learning and education, solidarity and collective action. The alternatives to the reformist approaches to worker and community education, and the uncritical talk about skills transfer, productivity and skills mismatch, must be counteracted by radical working class education, and socially useful knowledge. Working-class learning can build useful knowledge and its theories without waiting for academics to do so.
The need for internationalism
Finally, international collaborations must be forged in educational and other processes, building on networks of action that already exist. Without an internationalist orientation, it would be impossible to counteract the dominance of the oppressive regimes in power. I think that the struggles in Palestine, Sudan and the working classes everywhere have made internationalism more obvious and possible. Vast networks of activists involved in these struggles have appeared on the scene, and they are pointing directly to the complicity of corporate and imperial interests in the war against the global working class. Even more importantly they are also showing us the processes and strategies for counteracting these interests.
Enver Motala has been involved in supporting working-class organisations and social movements, especially regarding their educational activities, since the 1970s.
