Marxismo e intercultura

Abstract

The paper examines Marxist views on intercultural education. With respect to the «culturalism » dominating intercultural debates, which very often consider «cultures» as static, generic and divorced from concrete historical processes, pedagogical Marxism gives particular importance to the dialectic culture/relations of production, cognitive-symbolic dimensions / socio-economic structures. Marx argued that men become conscious of the world through ideological forms and he thus put forward «a dialectic relationship between structure and superstructure». Therefore, as an ideological form, education can also be an emancipating factor in order to achieve an «omnilateral man» (Marx), i.e., a man capable of expressing his own qualities in various directions. When Marx proposed reducing the working day to enable workers to see friends, educate their children, take part in political life, go to a conference, listen to music or paint pictures, he outlined – as the great humanist he was – the figure of a man finally free from the servitude of salaried work, a man no longer slave to commodities and to consumption, a disalienated man well disposed to the highest enjoyments of the spirit. All in the awareness that – and this is the dialectic contradiction – the aim of real equality in educational outcomes would only be possible by radically overturning the socio-economic mechanisms which go to determine current inequalities, even within schools. This is what fundamentally distinguishes Marxist views on education from other, albeit important, pedagogical orientations.