Abstract
Taking as its starting point, the emphatic defeat of the British Labour Party at the General Election of December 2019, this chapter considers the prospects for ‘knowledge socialism in one country’. Capitalism’s defenders stress the role of knowledge as the solution to economic, social and environmental problems, but knowledge socialism is likely to prove a better choice. The concept of knowledge socialism is explored through a discussion of non-market exchange, suggesting the need for socialist and/or post-capitalist alternatives. The Socialist Party of Great Britain has provided a vision for socialism as a practical alternative, and recent developments in technology make the discussion of how to organise life without markets more urgent than ever. The chapter traces the failure of the ‘educational left’ to convincingly propose alternatives to the conservative educational discourse of the past forty years, with the result that there is are few clearly articulated cases for socialist schooling. The chapter offers five distinctive strands of ‘left’ educational thought—mainstream left, critical left, communitarian left, left modernisers and socialist realism, and suggests their implications for knowledge and curriculum. The hope is that clarifying different positions will prompt deeper discussion of knowledge and schooling.
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Notes
- 1.
Tony Benn served in the Labour governments of the 1970s and was a key figure in the development of the Alternative Economic Strategy that was the basis for the Party’s 1983 election campaign. It argued for nationalisation of key industries, the raising of taxation to fund public services and the redistribution of wealth and incomes. The failure of this strategy in electoral terms ensured that New Labour took a decisive shift to the political centre, so Corbyn’s return to this terrain in 2017 and 2019 was highly significant.
- 2.
Blue Labour is a loose grouping around the Labour Party which emerged after the electoral defeat in 2010. It explained Labour’s defeat as a logical outcome of the governments of 2007–2010 to embrace globalisation and the market, and to favour the new over tradition. As a result, Labour lost the confidence, and eventually the votes, of its traditional working-class constituencies.
- 3.
Secular stagnation refers to long-term fall in the rate of economic growth, as opposed to cyclical stagnation. Originally coined by economic Alvin Hansen, it gained increased prominence in 2013 when the former US treasury secretary, Larry Summers, addressed the International Monetary Fund and warned that the global economy may be facing the prospect of secular stagnation.
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Morgan, J. (2020). The Prospects for Knowledge Socialism in One Country?. In: Peters, M.A., Besley, T., Jandrić, P., Zhu, X. (eds) Knowledge Socialism. East-West Dialogues in Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8126-3_12
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