Towards a society of equals: Dewey,Lippmann,the co-operative movement and radical democracy undermining neo-liberal forms of schooling

Interests and consequences

Dewey’s response to what many perceived from the later 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th century as a failure of traditional liberalism and varieties of socialism to achieve freedom (Audier, 2012) was to argue for a reinvigorated democratic public founded on educational experiences in schools as social laboratories. Although it can be argued that Dewey has so far essentially lost the educational debate (Labaree, 2010), the arguments for a deeper form of democracy and for democratic forms of education have not gone away. Part of what is at stake here can be found in the tension articulated in the so-called ‘debate’ between Dewey and Lippmann concerning the role of the public and of knowledge in a democracy. It is a so-called ‘debate’ because it never actually took place, although many overplayed their differing views on democracy with the view that Lippmann won, at least in terms of influence on the actual conduct of ‘democracy’ (Whipple, 2005). Dewey (1983: 337), however, broadly agreed with Lippmann’s account of democracy in Public Opinion (1922), but called it ‘perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned’. It is this indictment of what Dewey (1927) saw as the current conceptions of democracy that he wanted to address in his book The Public and Its Problems. Between the indictment and the response there continues a tension that still has to be addressed. Broadly, at the centre of this tension was the role of the government in its relation to the individual both in terms of private interests and public consequences. The central question for Lippmann was: How can an individual know enough to participate appropriately in all the very complex issues facing the governance of a modern society? For Dewey, it was: How can individuals seek redress for the consequences on their everyday lives caused by the decisions of others acting in their own private best interests? Lippmann’s (1927) answer was that society should be run by experts, and that the consent by the ‘public’ needed to ‘democratically’ legitimise decisions should be manufactured, which, in effect, creates what he called the ‘phantom public’. For Dewey, both democracy and education involved practical engagement and learning from the consequences of actions. The public, in his view, only comes into existence when consequences that may have positive impacts for some may also impact negatively on others. Thus, for Dewey:

Those indirectly and seriously affected for good or for evil form a group distinctive enough to require recognition and a name. The name selected is The Public. This public is organised and made effective by means of representatives who as guardians of custom, as legislators, as executives, judges, etc., care for its empirical interests by methods intended to regulate the conjoint actions of individuals and groups. Then and in so far, association adds to itself political organisation, and something which may be government comes into being: the public is a political state. (Dewey, 1927: 35)

In each case, the focus is on how to construct a society in the best interests of all – classically called ‘the good society’. Rather than critiquing in textual detail each contribution in this debate between Dewey-like and Lippmann-like positions, broad principles, values, practices and forms of organisation can be delineated – as, for example, between vertical lines of authority where decisions are made at the top and passed down through the ranks for delivery, on the one hand, and, on the other, horizontal networks necessitating equality of voice in decision-making. Whether vertical forms utilise ‘transformational leadership’ (Tourish, 2013) or ‘distributed leadership’ (e.g. MacBeath, 2005; Youngs, 2013), where the functions, qualities and practices of leadership are shared across complex organisations, or ‘democratic leadership’ (Woods, 2004) to the extent of appropriating quasi-democratic forms of meeting and project management, an essential criterion of the vertical form of organisation remains if it is not to become ‘leaderless’. As in phenomenological eidetic variation – the varying of structures to see what does not vary if, say, a triangle is to remain a triangle and not become a square or a circle (Tragesser, 1977) – the forms of leadership and top-down authority have to remain if they are not to produce an egalitarian form of co-operative, mutually beneficial organisation that is without a leader in the etymological sense of anarchism. At stake in these different articulations of how to create the conditions for ‘the good society’ was the freedom of individuals and how decisions are to be made in complex societies in their ‘best interests’.

This was essentially the focus of a conference held in Paris in August 1938 to explore the implications of Lippmann’s (1937) book The Good Society (Audier, 2012). Louis Rougier, the French philosopher behind the conference, saw the book as a way of creating a new approach to liberalism. In a speech to the conference, Alexander Rustow coined the term ‘neo-liberalism’ as a counter to the older, laissez-faire form of liberalism, but as a term that emphasised the prime importance of the price mechanism of a free and competitive market under the protection of a strong and impartial state (see Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009: 14). It was in such principles that they saw a response to the then contemporary fear of totalitarianism represented by state socialism and Nazism. The strong state, they thought, should only be directed to ensuring the freedom of the marketplace – a strong state, but not the big government of the Keynesianism that was a response to the pre-war depression years. In effect, the strong state was to facilitate decision-making by consumers and entrepreneurs in a free (or deregulated) market with their experts and line managers rather than a government engaged in producing a strong public, whether in its big-government form paternalistically or bureaucratically structured, as in a welfare state, or democratically structured, being sensitive to the social and personal impacts and consequences of private decision-making in corporately driven marketplaces. It is this latter that Dewey’s logic leads towards, as Lippmann’s (1922, 1927) leads towards a public displaced by experts who inform leaders. In Lippmann’s scenario, the consent of the public – a ‘phantom public’, he called it – is to be manufactured in order to underwrite the judgements, decisions and policies of leaders. In short, Lippmann’s arguments justify inequality of access to the decision-making of experts and leaders that impacts on people in their everyday lives. By hollowing out the idea of the public as an effective agency in democracy and replacing it with a public whose opinions are to be manufactured, freedom of decision-making is limited to those agents who have access to the means by which to shape opinions. In that sense, Lippmann is recognised as one of the founders of contemporary public relations, along with Bernays (1928), who talked about the engineering of consent in the interests of an invisible government, composed essentially of elites. These elites, in US society, as argued by C Wright Mills (2000), share common values and politics to the extent that they are educated in the same schools and universities, go to the same churches, socialise in the same clubs and marry into ‘good’ families. At the time of writing, he considered that ‘it is the military that has benefited the most in its enhanced power, although the corporate circles have also become more explicitly entrenched in the more public decision-making circles’ (Wright Mills, 2000: 276) and that:

in a formally democratic polity, the aims and the powers of various elements of this elite are further supported by an aspect of the permanent war economy: the assumption that the security of the nation supposedly rests upon great secrecy of plan and intent. (293)

In neoconservative terms, the manufacture of consent has drawn on the friend–enemy political logic promoted by Schmitt (1996), who, in the 1930s, was a Nazi supporter, and later his friend Strauss (1988), whose views strongly influenced key supporters and members of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations (Norton, 2004; Wilson, 2012), through to the present. For them, politics only comes into being and the state is only reinforced as an identity when there is an enemy. There is, then, a necessary schooling of views in order to ensure that populations recognise who is a friend and who is an enemy. The framing of these recognitions of ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ then depends fundamentally on whose voices count when making decisions and undertaking actions within camps and against camps. Where neoconservatives seek to exclude the dissimilar to themselves, ‘liberals’ – in the broadest sense of the term, focusing on ‘freedoms’ – seek to include in order to broaden the basis for decision-making. This sense of liberalism – or liberal democracy – can be seen in Lippmann’s advocacy of the good proponent:

The totalitarian rulers think they do not need the freedom of an opposition: they exile, imprison, or shoot their opponents. We have concluded on the basis of practical experience, which goes back to Magna Carta and beyond, that we need the opposition. We pay the opposition salaries out of the public treasury. In so far as the usual apology for freedom of speech ignores this experience, it becomes abstract and eccentric rather than concrete and human. The emphasis is generally put on the right to speak, as if all that mattered were that the doctor should be free to go out into the park and explain to the vacant air why I have a stomachache. Surely that is a miserable caricature of the great civic right which men have bled and died for. What really matters is that the doctor should tell me what ails me, that I should listen to him; that if I do not like what he says I should be free to call in another doctor; and that then the first doctor should have to listen to the second doctor; and that out of all the speaking and listening, the give-and-take of opinions, the truth should be arrived at. (Lippmann, 1939: 2 )

As a brief illustration, in the context of disputed figures employed during the 2016 British referendum campaign by those who wanted the UK to leave Europe, expertise was indeed called into doubt. As Michael Gove, a leading figure in the campaign to leave the European Union that popularly became known as Brexit (BRitain + EXIT) said: ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ (Mance, 2016). This disingenuous statement, of course, makes sense only within what became a powerful narrative labelling experts and elites as part of ‘project fear’ (Furedi, 2016), while members of wealthy elites such as Gove, Johnson and Farage were leading a ‘peasants’ revolt’ against elites (Logan, 2016). This story acts as a ‘pseudo-environment’ – rather like a Lacanian ‘fundamental fantasy’ – as Lippmann (1922: 4) calls it, which influences behaviour: ‘But because it is behaviour, the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in the pseudo-environment where the behaviour is stimulated, but in the real environment where action eventuates’. If no single person or group can possibly know of or control all the complexities of social interaction, communication and interpretation, there is, in effect, a social unconscious. As a solution, stories are told to fill in the gaps of knowledge and to provide content for debate, decision and action. Given that no one individual has direct experience of all other members of a complex society, ‘imagined communities’, as Anderson (1983) calls them, are created to fill the void. Thus, as Lippmann summarises it:

The analyst of public opinion must begin then, by recognising the triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action. It is like a play suggested to the actors by their own experience, in which the plot is transacted in the real lives of the actors, and not merely in their stage parts. (Lippmann, 1922: 5)

Despite the broad agreement, there is a difference that remains. First, Dewey emphasises the ground-up development of democracy – and education was to be central to this purpose – and the importance of equality in the building of community:

Dewey argued that the notion of general opposition between the social and the individual – of conflict on a broad scale among individuals and between society and individuals – is a reflection and false generalisation of particular conflicts that do arise, such as class conflicts, wars, and the tensions resulting from change … Such conflicts are exacerbated by the old concept of individualism. The task for American society, after the last remnants of that concept are eradicated, is to develop the social space where we can recognise the individual ‘as being in process, as developing in the course of social interaction and by means of society’s facilities’ (Campbell, 1995, p. 164). For Dewey, then, democracy was first a social, and only subsequently a political, phenomenon. He saw democracy as an ethical conception, and ‘upon its ethical significance is based its significance as governmental. Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association’ (Dewey, 1888/1993, p. 59). Democracy’s ethical significance is grounded in the concept of equality defined as the freedom generated by society for individuals to develop fully the potential each has for participation in the common life of all. (Evans, 2000: 312)

Where Lippmann sought a form of education through, as Goodwin put it, ‘the dignity of debate’, Dewey set out a model of the school as a social laboratory where young people would explore their powers and strengthen their habits of co-operation with others. In such a way, their capacity for democracy could be developed. As Mayhew and Edwards (1936: vi) state in their account of their experiences as teachers in Dewey’s experimental school, in this context ‘[l]earning, a main issue to the teacher, was seen as a side issue to the child, a by-product of his activity’ and ‘[t]he development of the curriculum was in relation to the immediate interests of growing children and thereby revealed the chief interests of the different psychological levels of this span in their life development’. Such views are repeated, amplified and supplemented through various progressive, child-centred or democratic attempts to design a different approach to the ways young people learn and grow to adulthood. And, as Fielding and Moss (2010) might say, we can of course choose our historical legacies rather than take for granted the mainstream narratives, and act prefiguratively to produce a more socially just society through democratic forms of schooling (see also Fielding, 2005). However, Mayhew and Edwards (1936) point out that Dewey became more pessimistic over the years, and a similar note of pessimism can be seen in the preface written for the Italian translation of Fielding and Moss’s book.

Pessimism is not, however, a reason for giving up. There are the long-lasting examples like Summerhill (Neill, 1973) or, say, the highly influential Reggio Emilia approach, ¹ or the more epoch-specific movement of free schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s – not to be confused with the ‘free’ schools set up under recent UK Conservative legislation as a market initiative, which have tended to help the richer rather than the poorer regions (Helm and Adams, 2017). Even if the pioneer schools have closed or changed beyond recognition, the ideas they express have a life of their own and continue in wider debates, and then as prompts to action. Pessimism is, in a sense, a recognition of, and thus a prelude to, the realistic strategy of mapping what prevents change and the development of democratic and more egalitarian forms of organisation. Critical pedagogies inspired by Freire, for example, offer a means of combining both social critique and an approach to action which can be taken up in various critical forms of action research directed towards social justice, as well as organisational, community and political equality (see Schostak, 2002; Schostak and Schostak, 2006, 2013). Apart from singular attempts with limited lifetimes – see, for example, Fielding’s (2005) discussion of Alex Bloom’s school – these ideas, practices and forms of organisation are largely counter to the hierarchical management of mainstream schooling.

It is relatively easy to see why. Democracy – in particular its demand for an equality of voice – is not in the interests of those who consider themselves born to rule, or to teach. From its inception, democracy has been hollowed out by elites (Schostak and Goodson, 2012, forthcoming; Schostak and Schostak, 2010, 2013), particularly the financial elites. The first task of the ‘money men’, as Bouton (2007) in his history of the early days of the American Revolution made clear, was to tame democracy – just as, perhaps, recently the multi-millionaire hedge-fund entrepreneur Arron Banks funded the Brexit campaign and the UK Independence Party, a right-wing nationalist political party (for an American view of Banks’s influence, see Barnett, 2016). Rather than supporting the direct participation that occurred in Pennsylvania, the ‘money men’, as exemplified by Morris, arguably the richest man in the USA at the time, saw democracy as the enemy to their freedom to accumulate wealth from the public (Bouton, 2007: 61-87 ). The danger of ordinary people deciding in their own interests and not those of the established order of the elites was clearly seen. In the UK, for example, Robert Lowe (1867), following an extension of voting rights, campaigned for the introduction of mass education so ‘that they may appreciate and defer to a higher cultivation when they meet it’ or, in a famous statement attributed to him: ‘I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters’ (cited in Sylvester, 1974:16 ). Such views fit nicely with those of Lippmann and Bernays. Moreover, the taming of democracy has been accomplished in the name of democracy and freedom. It has been tamed by dissociating freedom from equality in the interests of market freedoms. Perfect market competition, as an ideal case, of course made a number of assumptions concerning equality – for example, no one actor, whether as consumer or supplier, was able to significantly manipulate the market in its favour; knowledge of market conditions was to be perfectly and equally available to all; all actors were able to freely enter or leave markets; and all actors were to act rationally in their own interests, thus making perfectly rational choices. Neo-liberalism has, on the one hand, extolled the freedom of the individual as a rational economic actor, as neoconservatives have privileged the sovereignty – that is, effectively the radical freedom – of nation states. It is for these reasons that neo-liberals, such as Friedman (1953, 1982: 7–8), have closely linked the free rational choices of the markets with political freedoms in terms of the free rational choices of a voting public. Nevertheless, this link is effectively a sham in the sense that the economic freedom of the marketplace is, in this strict economic view, to take precedence over social and democratic political freedoms where there are conflicts, particularly where economic decisions taken in the rational interests of some impact adversely on others (see Hahnel, 2009). Thus, without freedom inextricably linked to a political equality capable of regulating unfettered decision-making, the freedom of some undermines the freedom of others, as, for example, ‘[i]f polluters are free to pollute, then victims of pollution are not free to live in pollution-free environments’ (Hahnel, 2009: 1007). Although, for several decades, neo-liberal theories were not adopted by mainstream economists, as Harvey (2005) and Klein (2008) describe, over four decades there was a gradual positioning of people influenced by the views of Hayek, Friedman and Ayn Rand in key governmental and financial institutions. The neo-liberal antipathy to socialism and equality worked well with the friend–enemy politics of neoconservative thinkers (Norton, 2004), and contributed to the strategies of those well-placed people who were ready, as Friedman describes, to take advantage of economic, political or other forms of crisis:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. (Friedman, 1982: xiv)

Thus, as an alternative to waiting, crises can always be engineered. This was at least the expressed hope of Peter Hargreaves, a billionaire funder of the Leave campaign, who saw engineering a Brexit as

‘the biggest stimulus to get our butts in gear that we have ever had’ … ‘It will be like Dunkirk again,’ he added, comparing Brexit to the British military’s forced evacuation from Europe after France fell to the Nazis.

The neo-liberal proposition was that all – even the poorest people – would be lifted if markets were deregulated to enable great entrepreneurs – like Rand’s Atlas figure – to create the wealth that, through the free market price mechanism, would ‘trickle down’ wealth (Quiggin, 2010). However, the proposition has conspicuously failed. For the last four decades, inequality has significantly increased (Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2012). In fact, as a World Health Organization report said: ‘Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale’ (Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2008: 26). Indeed, a recent article published by the International Monetary Fund – the heart, as it were, of global neo-liberalism – stated that although there was much to cheer about in neo-liberalism, actual benefits were hard to establish – there were the costs of increased inequality, which, in turn, impairs growth (Ostry et al., 2016). Following the financial crisis of 2008, many thought – at least for a very brief period – that neo-liberalism, indeed capitalism, was finished. It was not (Crouch, 2011; Mirowski, 2013; Quiggin, 2010; Schram, 2015).

If an alternative is to be produced that returns the focus to social justice, freedom and equality, then what principles, practices and forms of organisation are available – or ‘lying around’ – to be mobilised?

Freedom, equality, interests and co-operation

Given a crisis, the principle forms of organisation ‘lying around’ in contemporary societies privilege those who are already the strongest in terms of inherited wealth, position and access to opportunity. In that sense, society is already well formed to serve the interests of elites, and thus, following a crisis, more likely to be led by those who already benefit from inequality. The question of equality, like the freedom to compete under conditions of inequality, concerns the kind of society people want to live in. The Arab Spring showed a demand for an alternative society but, once the tyrant had toppled, the machineries of power that sustain inequalities remained. Similarly, the election of Obama seemed to offer change, but the structures and processes for the manufacture of disappointment were ‘lying around’ (Roberts and Schostak, 2012), which could be manipulated by the Trump campaign. So, in order to choose otherwise, what are the counter-principles, counter-practices and counterarguments by which to persuade others that remain to be mapped, strengthened and set in place? The first step, it seems to me, is to review the oppositional relation between freedom and equality that has been the main structuring device of elites in their attacks on equality (Rosanvallon, 2013).

The key ideas that animated the notion of the ‘society of equals’ have continued under a variety of guises. In them, the discourses of co-operativism, socialism and anarchism have their historical roots. Thus, for example, in Man, Society, and Freedom, Bakunin (1871: 237), developing his anarchist theories, wrote: ‘I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free’. It echoes in particular the Spinozan arguments explored by Balibar (1994, 2010) that those who have the greatest wealth or power are able to dominate those who have little, and thus take away their freedom to act. In short, Balibar encapsulates this proposition in the neologism égaliberté (‘equaliberty’) as fundamental to a free society. What he signifies by this is that freedom and equality are co-extensive – you cannot have one without the other. It is this inextricable relation between freedom and equality that is, I think, critical to developing an approach to a society of equals that avoids the banal association of equality by such writers as Hayek with bland homogeneity, command economies and totalitarianism. The principle of égaliberté, alongside the anarchist ideal of ‘without a leader’ – etymologically, an-arkhos (‘without a chief/ruler’) – enables next an attack on the ways in which inequality and hierarchies have been naturalised.

To develop social organisation without ‘natural or divine leaders’ to guide people, which is appropriate for a society of freedom, equality and justice, does not require identifying ‘natural’ laws to explain or justify behaviour. Rather, people either choose to engage with each other to explore their experiences, by voicing their ideas as equals about what could be and how to make changes to achieve ideals, or they choose unequal relations between each other where decisions and action always favour the rich, the privileged and the powerful. In each case, the critical relationship is between the powers of individuals and how they are organised for personal and social benefits. With this in mind, I do not regard education as a tool box of theories and practices drawn from other more ‘scientific’ disciplines, but as a critical perspective on how the powers of individuals are chosen to be drawn out, developed and employed in the interests of each. Thus, the strategic move is from behaviours to be observed and shaped to powers that are deployed for decision and action. This Spinozan turn to powers is decisive for the fullest development of democratic ways of life. Indeed, Spinoza has been considered the first modern philosopher to be a democrat (Ward, 2014), and as the inspiration for an alternative approach to modernity (Mack, 2010). Spinoza saw democracy as ‘natural’ in the sense that the powers of individuals are themselves produced by nature and

it is certain that nature, taken in the abstract, has sovereign right to do anything she can; in other words, her right is co-extensive with her power. The power of nature is the power of God, which has sovereign right over all things; and inasmuch as the power of nature is simply the aggregate of the powers of all her individual components, it follows that every individual has sovereign right to do all that he can; in other words the rights of an individual extend to the utmost limits of his power as it has been conditioned. Now it is the sovereign law and right of nature that each individual should endeavour to preserve itself as it is, without regard to anything but itself; therefore this sovereign law and right belongs to every individual, namely to exist and act according to its natural conditions. We do not here acknowledge any difference between mankind and other individual natural entities, nor between men endowed with reason and those to whom reason is unknown; nor between fools, madmen, and sane people. (De Spinoza, 2004: 45)

Focusing on experience as a means to enhance powers provides a way of reimagining Dewey’s laboratory school as an approach for people to experiment with the aggregation of powers for mutual benefit. In order to do this, given that individuals have their own interests, strategies for handling debates about conflicting interests, disagreements and so forth will have to be developed that lead to creative solutions. A radical democracy, if all views are to be equal in order to optimise the benefits accruing from the fullest development and expression of powers, means for Rancière (1999) being faithful to the disagreement – that is to say, all views are to be counted in decision-making. In this formula, there is no simple majority rule where the views of a minority are frustrated. This, of course, is not easy. And, as such, it makes for a powerful educational principle – a principle that radicalises discovery learning, child-centred learning and work-based learning generally to produce a form of learning that depends on the fullest expression not only of one’s own powers, but also of those of others. This radically democratic direction of travel, for example, has been the subject of recent studies in educational research methodologies (see Schostak and Schostak, 2008) and philosophy of education (see Bingham and Biesta, 2011), and more generally in terms of critical public pedagogies (for an overview, see Sandlin et al., 2011). Such approaches, with their focus on education’s capacity for emancipatory social change, contrast with and act as an antidote to the view held by those such as Marsh (2011) and Blacker (2013), who argue that given the decreasing need of capitalists for an educated workforce due to advances in automation and intelligent technologies (Collins, 2013), there is little, if any, real role left for the education system in bringing about social justice. At face value, it broadly reduces education to an empirical observation of the outcomes of a contemporary form of its social organisation. That form of social organisation is already the product of the systematic erosion of democratic and egalitarian approaches to the organisation of work, whether in schools or the corporations that dominate the public and private spheres of society. What stands out in this contrast with Marsh and Blacker is thus how successful the systematic undermining of democracy as the political form appropriate for a society of equals has been. Education has been reduced to being a servant to the elites, incapable of promoting change. Indeed, today, in what, for example, Giroux (2012) calls ‘dark times’, there have been increasing moves not only to monitor and manage curricula and performance, but also to utilise schools, colleges and universities as part of a more general national security strategy to prevent people from being radicalised in the fight against terrorism (Durodie, 2015; Gearon, 2015). What has been manufactured is a permanent sense of anxiety (Bauman, 2006; Bordoni, 2017), enabling emergency legislation under a permanent ‘state of exception’ (Agamben, 2005) where, if a state defines itself as being in peril, it is able to suspend the law in order to adopt what amounts to dictatorial powers. This indeed foreshadows a return to the ‘politics of dark times’. However, rather than accepting this ‘dark times’ conclusion, critical analyses of how it has been manufactured over time provide the possibility for deconstruction (see Benhabib et al., 2010).

Just as Bouton (2007) described how the radical ideas concerning equality developed in the years preceding the American Revolution were then systematically undermined by moneyed elites, Rosanvallon (2013) provides a wider account of the vicissitudes of discourses about equality following the revolutions in the USA, France and Santo Domingo (the post-revolutionary name of which is Haiti); these three he sees as the key revolutions of modernity addressing issues of class and sovereignty, and the latter specifically as addressing slavery and race. For Rosanvallon (2013: 11), there are three key principles that can be drawn from these historical experiences for the society of equals: singularity, reciprocity and communality. Singularity speaks to the issue of individualism and individuality. It is defined in relation to others and ‘binds a person to others’ (260) – that is to say, people’s differences are significant to the extent that they are seen in relation to others who are ‘like them’ but not the same as them, so that:

Each individual seeks to stand out by virtue of the unique qualities that he or she alone possess. The existence of diversity then becomes the standard of equality. Each individual seeks his or her own path and control over his or her history. Everyone is similar by dint of being incomparable. (260)

There is, of course, great variety in the organisation of co-operatives, and many have adopted hierarchical forms of organisation and succumbed to neo-liberal operating practices, as evidenced in the troubles of the UK Co-operative Bank, which, to survive following bad decision-making, had to be taken over by an American hedge fund (Treanor and Farrell, 2013). Even under such circumstances, the expressed principles and values can act as criteria by which to critique and propose reform to what is essentially a subversion of the co-operative ideals and principles. As Rosanvallon (2013: 4) points out, the systematic erosion of the value of equality requires a consent to inequality. The myths underlying such consent have been described by Dorling (2015) as the efficiency of elitism – that exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and despair is inevitable.

Schools have long had the role of either openly or as a hidden curriculum reinforcing or combatting these myths that together underpin the ‘natural’ order of inequality (e.g. see Benn, 2012; Blacker, 2013; Marsh, 2011). Here, inequality is much more than the expression of difference – it involves a judgement of better or worse, and the allocation of rewards, privileges and resources by elites accordingly. Such discourses of inequality are essential to a political framework of us and them, of friend and enemy, of good and bad and, more broadly, to generate consent to practices that are discriminatory and aggressive and, indeed, employed to drive consent to engage in war through the friend–enemy political logics of Schmitt (1996) and Strauss (1988) that underpinned the neoconservative allied to neo-liberal market policies from Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. This continued through to Blair’s New Labour (Gould and Robert, 2015; Jessop, 2007) and on into the current political global scene that has Brexit and Trump as its symptoms (e.g. see Wallerstein, 2016). Broadly speaking, in general, whether passively, actively or indeed reluctantly, by consenting to the forms of organisation within which we work and live and under which we are governed, inequalities are embedded socially, psychologically, economically, politically and culturally. In particular, how schools, universities and learning environments of all kinds are organised has consequences for the impacts they have on students, staff and wider members of society. It is not enough to have alternative ideas ‘lying around’. People, organisations and strategies need to be in place. Choosing to implement in all forms of organisation a discourse of equality is just that: a choice that each individual has to find the courage to make in their everyday affairs. Is it realistic?

Choosing differently: steps for creating beginnings

There is the considerable weight of social institutions and organisation to be brought to bear on the individual who dares to oppose or protest. Indeed, as argued by Roberts and Schostak (2012), protest is not enough. For many, there was hope in the Arab Spring and the various protests epitomised by the loose, non-hierarchical anarchistic structure of the Occupy movement. Indeed, such was the air of ‘revolution’ that Mason (2012) enthusiastically titled the second edition of his book Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere. And Newman (2010a, 2010b) saw in the new strategies employed by the social media generations a politics of ‘postanarchism’, which he viewed as a project of radicalising and a form of deconstruction. For this he draws on radical democratic theories, in particular Mouffe’s description of antagonism and the political that emerges as a radical opening for alternative futures (Newman, 2010a: 8). For him, ‘postanarchism provides us with a new conception of the autonomy of the political, which transcends both the Schmittian and liberal paradigms’(Newman, 2010a: 9). Where Schmitt saw the state as the ‘primary locus of politics’, Newman sees the state as a locus of depoliticisation because ‘it is the structure of power that polices politics, regulating, controlling and repressing the insurgent dimension that is proper to the political’ (8). As such, this definition returns to Rancière’s (2004) notion of the ‘police order’ and his distinction between politics as the work of policymakers and the political as that moment when the normal processes of policing the social order go out of focus and individuals see each other anew as equals in the face of open possibilities for creating alternative ways of living together. The Internet and its capacity to create not only new forms of communication, but also new ways of creating communities and acting, seemed for many to offer just this opening to remake the world of everyday life in more socially just and democratic forms. While there has been considerable hope and excitement, by the very temporary nature of the occupations and encampments that stand against or outside the police order of society, they have not as yet created that more general political moment where structural change takes place. It could be argued just as strongly that it is not ‘kicking off everywhere’ but just at the edges. Indeed, more ironically, it could be countered that the ‘kicking off’ has been undertaken in the interests of right-wing politics and, in particular, the alt-right politics of Bannon’s Breitbart (Sellers and Fahrenthold, 2017) with its connections to Cambridge Analytica (Cadwalladr, 2017b) and its role in both the Brexit and the Trump campaigns. Choosing differently depends not only on the kinds of social, political and educational theory that are to be articulated in practice, but also on the circumstances and the forms of organisation that are available and that are able to be constructed.

Discursively, a discourse of the society of equals offers a different logic to that of the reliance on elites – that is, the master discourses that in Lacan’s terms propose at best only the chance of choosing a better master. As Žižek (2013) put it – thus implicitly appealing to Dorling’s (2015) myth of the efficiency of elites – people ‘need a good elite, which is why a proper politician does not only advocate people’s interests, it is through him that they discover what they “really want”’. In short, he argued the people need a ‘Thatcher of the Left’. Drawing on Lippmann, in Žižek’s view, the relation between experts and a leader as master is ‘for the experts to present the situation in its complexity, and it is for the Master to simplify it into a point of decision’. Unfortunately, waiting in the wings of the continuing neo-liberal crisis, it was Farage in the UK and Trump in the USA who were best able to simplify the discontent and the unsaid of the people. As argued in Schostak (2016), the logic of equality offers a counter to that of the hierarchical decision-making of the master, and thus a way out of the cyclical search for masters that essentially changes nothing. The discourse of the society of equals does not give either comfort or accommodation to those who rely on Žižek’s self-proclaimed lazy politics of leaving decisions to leaders and their experts. In order not to give in to being too tired to learn and take decisions, the hierarchy that leaders depend on for their power over others needs to be scrutinised and attacked.

The anarchist politics of Mason and Newman are not the politics of the lazy but argue for direct action through co-operation and mutuality. However, if there is to be serious change to the communities, institutions and organisations within which people live and work, subjectivity itself becomes an issue as the discourses that promote hierarchy and inequality through voluntary servitude are a barrier to change (Newman, 2010b). Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 105) argue that discourse acts to bring together diverse and dispersed elements into new forms under a process of articulation – that is, ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’. Thus, Laclau (2005) has, for example, argued that engaging in democratic debate where each voice can be heard equally in the debate involves a change in subjectivity and identity, since these are always discursively produced – that is to say, for example, under democratic decision-making, to include the voice of the other in the processes leading up to decision-making brings change because the view of the other must be included in the response, if it is to be understood and taken into account by the other. Modifications and refinements take place as the one attempts to understand the other in order to represent the other in the reply. There is then the potential to create real change. By articulating – for example, painting a more explanatory picture of the world in the Lippmann sense – individuals may accentuate their commonalities (or the extent to which they are equal) rather than their differences and thus form new alliances against those who hold a different representation of how the world is, or ought to be. This alliance, however, becomes somewhat fragile if it is built simply on the mutual opposition to a particular ‘other’. As soon as the goal is achieved, the alliance is no longer required. Those who were once friends in one battle may find themselves on opposing sides in another. This suggests that the use of a friend–enemy strategy, even in its watered-down form, is insufficient to maintain a broader struggle for a broader notion of a society of equals. For example, a rich person alongside a poor person may well join forces to counter discrimination against gender, ethnicity and faith. However, their alliance may well not continue into the fight against the accumulation of wealth and power by the rich.

This is precisely the kind of issue McCormick (2011) tackles through his reading of Machiavelli as providing a politics not so much as in the popular interpretation that advises Princes how to ruthlessly win and hold onto power, but that develops strategies to protect the people from the Princes. For example, in McCormick et al.’s (2014) discussions of contemporary local and national governance, this includes reviving ‘the institution of the plebeian tribunate from ancient Rome, an institution that he claimed made Rome “more perfect” by enabling common Roman citizens to “beat back the insolence of the nobles”’. Or, in more contemporary terms, the question is how to ‘beat back the insolence’ of the rich and powerful who engage in maintaining inequality as a ‘natural’ phenomenon. How might the plebeian tribunal work in any organisation and, in particular, in a school or university? Following Machiavelli’s logic, it would involve randomly drawing up membership of a body from members of staff, regardless of status, that would have the power to challenge and overrule senior management decisions of all kinds. The tribunal could draw its membership much more widely by including both staff and students of the school or university. It could, of course, go wider still and include members of the community. The strategy of forming tribunals could be constructed at various levels of the operation in order to hold senior elites to account and to constrain their personal ambitions or insolence. By increasing the range of views involved in management decision-making, what is taught as well as how it is taught becomes open to question, particularly if these articulate the world views of the rich and powerful. In this way, more openly democratic approaches to the curriculum and forms of teaching and learning can be explored in the manner, for example, of a Deweyian approach informed by contemporary debates on radical democracy and education, in particular Rancière (see Bingham and Biesta, 2011). Although radical democratic theory and McCormick’s rereading of Machiavelli provide insights and strategies to constrain the insolence of the elites, there is still the issue of actually realising it in the real worlds of contemporary practice. Thus, despite an increasing interest in Dewey (e.g. see the collection of articles dedicated to the centennial of his Democracy and Education in the Journal of Curriculum Studies (Rethinking John Dewey’s, 2016)) and democratic theory in education, the potential for radical democracy or, indeed, contemporary anarchist or postanarchist strategies to inaugurate the society of equals through a Deweyian or Rancièreian style of education will remain in the realm of a philosophical, political and education Utopia if its strategies for success are dependent on, say, the openness of elites to limit their powers – a somewhat far-fetched hope, it seems to me! Žižek proposed the necessity of a ‘Thatcher of the Left’ to galvanise and lead people towards a more socially just future. However, with its premise on the vital importance of the leader, this too undermines the very idea of the society of equals on which social justice depends. Nor, indeed, does the Rancièreian political moment offer much more than the possibility of a long wait unless steps are taken to prepare for and encourage such a moment. Simply put, if neither the resources nor the democratic forms of organisation are put into place in the immediacies of everyday life in all the forms of organisation that impact on individuals, a democratic society of equals will remain an idea yet to be born in practice. Similarly, if indeed the material resources and forms of democratic organisation do exist, but without the commitment to the ideas that animate them, the society of equals as a practice will be subverted (Davidge, 2017; Schostak, 2014b). Indeed, contemporary policies, laws and employment conditions have, during the rise of neo-liberal ideologies, enhanced the power of wealthy owners and their managers through the deregulation of markets, weakening trades and professional unions and rendering individuals precarious (Standing, 2014). In Mason’s (2012, 2015) view, however, there are seeds of change: the fall of capitalism has begun! For this reason, he joined Momentum, ² the left-wing movement, predominantly youth-driven, supporting the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which identified a key common cause to be addressed – anti-austerity – and the way to succeed: that weaknesses in organisation need to be addressed, and that the different left movements and organisations need to be affiliated, and understand and use big data (Mason, 2017). This striving towards forming alliances against the ‘enemy’ thus still echoes the political logic associated with Schmitt and Strauss. The self-organising principles and practices of movements such as Momentum, through affiliation with a much older organised party machine, have the danger of transforming it into a tool of the machine. However, given that Momentum is a ‘grass-roots’ movement, it is possible for it to act as a way of constraining the insolence of party elites. It is this latter possibility – the role of action at the grass-roots to constrain or modify action by elites – that provides the potential for real ‘seeds’ for change. Unlike ‘one-off’ or ‘single-issue’ grass-roots movements, groups or organisations that exert pressure from the outside, this approach exerts pressure from the inside.

Within the education system, one significant example of pressure exerted from the inside is the opportunity perceived by Mervyn Wilson, the then principal of the Cooperative College, ³ to use the then Conservative government’s legislation on free schools and academies, directed to the private sector, to set up co-operative schools. Currently in the UK there are about 600 schools that have adopted a co-operative legal identity and have built into their constitutions and forms of governance the co-operative values and principles. Theoretically, these 600 schools can act as the ‘grass-roots’ able to invoke the co-operative values and principles legally written into the constitution of the schools as a way of constraining the insolence elites, whoever these may be – say, head teachers or external policymakers. The extent to which these are, however, articulated in practice remains to be seen. Certainly, early empirical research indicates that interpretations of what it means to be a co-operative school can be deployed that are disciplinarian, surveillance-driven and managerialist (Davidge, 2017; Schostak, 2014b). Nevertheless, the values and principles of co-operation that a school professes can come back to haunt managerialists and disciplinarians as students, staff and parents use them as a source of legitimate critique (Schostak, 2017). With every reading, words accrue creative mischief – a term, I think, that is better and more powerful than deconstruction, disruption, undoing and so forth. The idea of the society of equals explicit in the constitution of a co-operative organisation demands that alternative readings are taken seriously – that is to say, that each reading is both educational and political. It is educational in terms of opening steps towards learning from the experience of implementing interpretations whether as a speculative exercise or in practice. It is of public concern, and thus political, in that any behaviour following from an interpretation has consequences. In Rancière’s (1999) sense, the recognition of the equality of voices both in making claims about interpretations and in engaging in action as an equal amongst equals is radically political. In this meaning, within a framework of an equality of powers, education and the political are co-extensive in terms of creating the discursive conditions for thinking about and establishing claims about the nature of the good society and making demands for steps towards it. By radically including all views, as Lippmann pointed out, the dignity of debate is supported and is educational, so that – particularly when including Dewey’s notion of the laboratory school – their truth claims are tested through processes of learning from debate and practice. In Rancière’s (1991) terms, this evokes the idea of an equality of intelligences for the production of what I used to like to call, as a form of creative mischief, ‘intelligence communities’ (Schostak, 1988) as an approach to breaking into the mainstream curriculum, exploring the then emergent idea of hacking. It is here where the discourse of equality operates fully in freedom and, in doing so, inequality becomes a measure of the reduction in overall benefits that comes from the blockage and undermining of the powers of the many. People build their own intelligence, in that more inclusive sense of the term, as a mutually educative practice that involves the finding and testing of knowledge and skills appropriate for the purposes of all in the community. There is an echo here with Rosanvallon’s (2012) counter-democracy, which refers to the powers of publics to turn the tables on elites who define what is to count as ‘democracy’. Rather than surveillance and monitoring being top-down through security agencies, the agencies that are controlled by elites can themselves to be opened to scrutiny by individuals gathering and sharing information by forming critical associations outside of the institutions of politics. This has often been the role of the investigative journalist and organisations that have developed to advocate for rights and freedoms. However, most significantly, it is the role of forms of education that create critical tools of reflection and enable individuals to explore and develop alternative forms of social organisation that create the conditions where freedom with equality can be realised as practical accomplishments in everyday life. In short, the best security for people is the security derived from free and equal associations. It is this that moves democracy from being just an agonistic politics – in, for example, Mouffe’s (e.g. 2005) sense of radical democracy – to a social, cultural and educational as well as political practice that always prefigures a society of equals for all as a co-operative project of mutual benefit.

Will it happen?

Choosing conclusions

Certainly, there is the evidence of the co-operative movement itself as to what is both possible and practical. There is evidence of social movements of all kinds ‘kicking off’, as Mason (2012) puts it. As indicated above, a co-operative approach provides a more positive means of cultivating the powers of individuals to create their own economic, social, political, educational and cultural forms of organisation that actively embed the discourses and the organisational forms of practice, mechanisms and procedures required to sustain a society of equals. The combination of democratic and co-operative forms of organisation hence offers a countervailing political economy that is a positive step, rather than a negative or constraining step. Thus, articulating the Machiavellian with the co-operative democratic, there is a double strategy: a negative counterforce to the already embedded inequalities of the elites and a positive building inside and alongside that sucks the energy from a competitive system because a co-operative system provides greater benefits for all rather than just for a few.

With the neo-liberal/neoconservative complex and the co-operative/democracy complex there are two distinct ways of governing everyday life. The discourses of each create the conditions for thinking through implementing and critiquing the consequences of adopting either, and thus constraining the insolence of those who seek to manufacture consent. In thinking of the good society and education’s role in producing it, the issue which all questions need to address, I think, is how educational forms of organisation may be constructed to prevent the elite capture of powers to the detriment of those whose powers are monopolised and those who experience the consequences. Since there is no perfectly balanced democracy of interests – because there is always a new viewpoint to include that disturbs any previous sense of balance – there is always the expression of a dissatisfaction or a disappointment with the perceived status quo and a demand for change. In that sense, democracy as a means of organising a society of equals, if it is to be conceived as a desirable order to move towards, is best conceived as a post-structural device that is always in movement, never complete and always in want of fulfilment. Equality in the sense being employed here is not the same as balance, equilibrium or the sameness of homogeneity. Neither democracy nor the society of equals is completable. This continual development towards a society of equals necessitates a principle of democracy that overrides all laws and rules that reduce democratic access to an organisation’s decision-making processes. It is thus, I have argued, the key safeguard to the elite appropriation of the powers of others to enforce their leadership narratives for anti-democratic purposes. Through discourses of equality, people can write ‘the poetry of their own futures’ (Harvey, 2014), unsullied by the narratives of elite mastery.