Maisuria, A and Beach, D (2017) Ethnography and Education: Ethnography and Explanatory Critique. Oxford

Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press. [republished as part of special issue in 2019]

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Ethnography and Education: Ethnography and Explanatory Critique

Alpesh Maisuria and Dennis Beach

Summary

As described on page 13 of Beach and Dovemark’s book on Education and the Commodity

Problem (2007) critical researchers such as Ainley (2000), Allman (1999) and Brosio (1994)

have identified two fundamental roles for modern-day schools within capitalist States. These

are the ideological and material roles (Althusser 1971), where schools produce ideologically

compliant workers and consumers for a new corporatist economy on the one hand, and form

part of a corporate business plan for the accumulation of private capital in the welfare sector on

the other (Hill, 2006); the latter is increase shifting from quasi/pre-privatisation which entails

mass outsourcing, to the wholesale commodification of public services.

In this chapter we present a social science philosophical research method for investigating

education in these circumstances, for not only understanding contemporary educational

empirical reality under neoliberal forms of capitalism, but also for developing critical

consciousness for the transcendence and transformation of this condition toward a more just

form of political economy and human existence (McLaren, 2000).We posit that a Marxist

critical ethnography that is robust as a science drawing from critical realism and its concept of

explanatory critique. In relation to this, the chapter provides an overview of some of the basic

principles and broadly accepted possibilities of/for ethnography and critical ethnography,

followed by a presentation of what we consider as specifically Marxist critical ethnography and

Marxist critical ethnography as explanatory critique respectively. Here we explain what

explanatory critique is, and how it can be used to develop a philosophy of social science and

ontological base for ethnography. The different parts of the paper together expand on a

historical, theoretical, conceptual and political development of ethnography as part of Marxist

approach to research and practice for social transformation.

Banfield (2004) drew out implications for methodological practice of a critical ethnography of

this kind, and they correspond broadly with our criteria : the need to hold to a stratified emergent

ontology with a materialist view of history and of social class, and the importance of taking

these structures and generative mechanisms as the object of inquiry when accepting, at the same

time, the openness and unpredictability of the social world and understanding events as the

outcome of multiple causal processes and contingent aspects of material history and its social

relations.

Keywords: Social class, critical ethnography of education, Marxism, demystification, social

transformation, Hegemony

Introduction

Ethnography has for many years been used a method to investigate empirical reality, which is

the lived and experienced world as it exists. However, whilst this has yielded useful data for

building scholarship about social life it has not always helped with building critical

consciousness. Much ethnography fails to engage with this issue (Allman, 1999; McLaren,

2000). Taking this recognition as a starting point, in this paper we develop ethnography in three

inter-related ways. Firstly, as a method to be used as part of research framed theoretically and

philosophically within a Marxist tradition (Sharpe, Green and Lewis, 1975). We argue this is

necessary if we are to understand contemporary reality under neoliberal forms of capitalism

globally and develop critical consciousness for its transcendence and transformation to a more

just form of political economy and human existence (McLaren, 2000). Related to this

development, secondly, we posit that this Marxist critical ethnography can be made more robust

as a science by drawing from critical realism and the concept of explanatory critique to

articulate deep reality to understand neoliberal mechanisms that generate socio-cultural forms

that are lived in empirical reality. This positing of a more analytically sophisticated Marxist

critical ethnography then connects to the third development, which is that ethnography needs

to be used as part of a quest for social transformation. Social transformation in the sense we

mean it here is a process of revolutionary material and cultural change within the social system

as a whole, be this local, state, national or global. It requires a shift in collective consciousness

in terms of a consensual reimagining of reality that can make a transition from one mode of

production to another feasibly possible and sustainable. While not being an absolute certainty,

we claim that change becomes possible after first demystifying the exploitative, alienating and

unfair/unequal neoliberal capitalism manifesting in everyday life, and importantly education.

Ethnography is in these ways and by these means and intentions adjusted towards transcending

the dominant capitalist ideologies shared by the majority of the people in society as a

mechanism of social control that frames how the majority of the population (should) think about

the nature of and their places in society (Maisuria, 2017). Ethnography taken in this way has an

educative role and function, as well being a method.

Our presentation of ethnography as a research method in educational research for social

transformation is divided into different sections. The first provides an overview of some of the

basic principles and broadly accepted possibilities of ethnography and critical ethnography. It

is followed by a presentation of what we consider as specifically Marxist critical ethnography,

with its emphasis on class relations and emancipation. This section provides the foregrounding

to develop Marxist critical ethnography as explanatory critique in the next section. Here we

explain what explanatory critique is, and how it can be used to develop a philosophy of social

science and ontological base for ethnography. These different parts of the paper together expand

on a historical, theoretical, conceptual and political development of ethnography as part of

Marxist approach to research and practice for social transformation.

The orientation we provide is about the identification, theorization, and analysis of the

mechanisms in society that generate the conditions for socio-cultural tendencies that shape

consciousness and ideology. The mechanisms are often unobservable but they emerge in

empirical reality to be alienating, exploitative, and anti-intuitive; thus in terms of the

organisation of resistance to capitalism’s (and above all of course current global neoliberal

capitalism’s) dominant ideas and values (Malott, 2010). The commitment of this type of

ethnography is to unmask how particular cultural forms of understanding and practice evolve

and materialise in ways that obscure the mode of (currently neoliberal) capitalist production

and its inequalities, disempowerment and patterns of unfairness through consent to the

status quo (Gramsci, 1971). It has the ultimate aim to enhance capabilities to question and

name neoliberal capitalism as part of what is generally accepted as ‘normal’ in order to build a

capacity for breaking free from the conditions that prevent human flourishing and a more just

mode of production.

From ethnography to Marxist critical ethnography

Writing recently on the value(s) of ethnography for education research the cultural sociologists

Anna Lund, Mats Trondman and Paul Willis (Trondman, Willis and Lund, 2017) recalled a

1907 debate on the meaning and use of ethnography that was held in Paris involving leading

social scientists of the day such as sociologist Emile Durkheim and political economist René

Worms. Worms was one of the first speakers. He gave an account of ethnography with three

main standpoints followed by a conclusion. Ethnography, he asserted, concerned developing

(1) assemblies of materials and (2) descriptions of people with a focus that pertained to ‘barbaric

and savages societies’. It could (3) only provide accounts of their activities in the present. The

conclusion was that ethnography was thus purely descriptive and incapable of being analytical

or critical. It was a-historical and relevant only to the study of so-called ‘primitive’ societies

(Trondman et al., 2017).

Durkheim entered the debate after Worms and he significantly disagreed with his position.

Ethnography need not be restricted only to description he suggested and could provide a basis

in data for both analysing and also more broadly synthesizing understandings of the past in

relation to the present. Durkheim was advancing an ethnography that included contemporaneity

and history and he also went on to suggest that this use of ethnography was not restricted only

to what Worms referred to as primitive societies (Trondman et al., 2017). All human societies

have their version of civilization and for this reason ethnography is applicable to all societies

he asserted and added that ethnography need not only be descriptive. It can also be analytical

and it even has a potential for critical analysis. Marx alluded already in Capital Volume 1 as to

why this critical analysis is important.

The social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character

stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to

the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation existing

not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the

reason the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities

are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses ... It is only a

definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form

of a relation between things. (Marx, Capital I, p. 72.)

Like most ethnographers today, we see more value in the position adopted by Durkheim than

that expressed by Worms. Indeed we agree with Martyn Hammersley in his opening article in

the inaugural number of the Journal of Ethnography and Education in 2006, where he

elaborated on points like those recognized by Durkheim, by suggesting that ethnography has

many driving forces and possible scientific interests and that as a practice it has been influenced

by a diverse range of theories and methodologies within sociology and other disciplines, such

as education, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. The influential theories and

methodologies include phenomenology, existentialism, symbolic interactionism,

ethnomethodology, Marxism, feminism and semiology. They have developed in research on

different topics in different kinds of institutions and contexts influenced by both modern and

postmodern epistemologies (Hammersley, 2006).

In terms of the adoption and development of ethnography in educational research along the

lines described first by Durkheim and then Hammersley, in his inaugural editorial presentation

in the Journal of Ethnography and Education in 2006, the English sociologist of education

Geoff Troman (2006) identified the so-called New Sociology of Education (NSE) initially

presented in a ground-breaking book edited by M.F.D. Young in 1971 as being particularly

influencial (Troman, 2006). The NSE foregrounded both neo-Marxist and also interactionist

perspectives Troman pointed out (Troman, 2006), and by this crucially presented possibilities

for research that could uncover social reproduction in the interests of change and open up the

‘black box’ of education for serious analysis from both critical, interactionist and also other

perspectives (Troman, 2006).

The NSE movement included several ethnographic researchers with either or a combination of

interactionist, phenomenological, existentialist and critical interests (Troman, 2006). Their

work focussed on a broad cross section of the everyday activities in school sites, such as identity

development and communication processes, patterns of interaction in school classrooms,

differentiation-polarisation, and misrepresentations in and the symbolic violence of schooling

processes. Research by Sharpe, Green, and Lewis (1975) provides a good illustration of the

critical tradition in the ethnographic method. They described and theoretically accounted for

how actors and interactions at school sites can both (re)produce and also challenge the

ideological values, knowledge and interests of the ruling class and the political economy of

capitalism and its asymmetric power relations. They can in other words help to either stabilize

or challenge power relations in society (Malott, 2010) and although they are noramlly

(understood as) sites for creating consent in this sense (Gramsci, 1971), they are crucially also

sites where struggle can be generated (Foley, 2002; Maisuria, 2017; McLaren, 2000; Willis,

1977). Ethnography thus has the potential to be analytical and critical toward reproduction and

subsequently heuristically developmental in relation to the illumination and elaboration of

possibilities for and practices of resistance (Beach, 2010).

In order to be critical within this particular framing an ethnographic approach requires three

things according to, inter alia, Trondman et al (2017), McLaren (2000) and Maisuria (2016).

The first is to study education in its lived forms: this is what critical realists call empirical

reality. The second is to de-mystify and de-naturalize what has been taken for granted in

empirical reality (Maisuria, 2017), which is about moving beyond appearance and mere

observation to reinvigorate ontology. The third is to then re-naturalize the status quo in terms

of more progressive educational values and practices and devote effort to identifying what

conditions have to be satisfied in order that education for social change may be a reality and

not a name or a slogan. An ethnography that would be able to contribute to that aim and

objective would be, as Trondman et al. put it, paraphrasing Durkheim, infinitely precious and

powerful, in terms of possibilities for changing the kinds of common sense that lead to consent.

Indeed it can, we mean, ultimately be used very effectively for the purpose of the development

of critical consciousness and social transformation (Malott, 2010).

Marxist critical ethnography

Critical ethnography, particularly when influenced by Marxism, offers a significantly

interesting means toward an infinite preciousness for a transformative quest. It does so by de-

naturalising and exploring the social relations and practices of contemporary capitalism, in

terms of its co-incidences, as they materialise within the empirical reality of society and

education. It does this first concretely and internally by getting-up and close to sites of

exploitation and oppression through participant observation, and learning about how they are

lived, experienced, challenged and also changed from within by subjects themselves (Willis,

1977). This endows the researcher with first-hand experience of what actively and actually

shapes forms of consent, alienation, exploitation and symbolic violence in the world. These are

the causally efficacious mechanisms that create the condition for reality to be the way that it is

empirically. It allows learning from communities of practice on a daily basis in social

interaction as class cultures with unique, self-valorizing and expressive (symbolic) cultural

practices with material consequences (Foley, 2002; Maisuria, 2017; Willis, 2000). Second, it

explores how meaning and action can be understood in association with the self-interpretation

of concrete individuals. The analysis identifies these in terms of their local concrete lived and

spoken characteristics and what these represent in terms of possibly more global or general

tendencies. These are discerned more ‘externally’ through a fine dialectic analytical movement

involving three theories: a theory of meaning (Vorstruktur des Verstehens) in which

understanding is seen to proceed from what precedes it, a theory of action in which meaning is

understood as also carried out concretely, and a theory of experience understood in terms of a

lifeworld and forms of appropriation, and comprehension.

Crucially what is important for Marxist critical ethnographers is that consciousness and

practices in empirical reality also include moments of talk, action, and observation of these

when consent is seemingly weakened, thus suggesting that this consent to dominant ideologies

and the status quo is neither hermetically sealed nor inevitable, but rather an outcome from a

constant process of class struggle (Maisuria, 2017). These cultural manifestations are then

interrogated to enable a more complete grasping of the micro/macro dialectic that is useful for

accounting for contextually sensitive parameters and an understanding of both the power of the

ruling class ideology and of resistance from the subjected as being in constant hegemonic

struggle and never fully fixed (Maisuria, 2017). It involves detailed textured investigations of

the complexity of empirical reality and an attempt to establish some understanding of the

political economy of capitalism as lived and the conditions necessary for this empirical reality

(Beach, 2010).

The concept of social class and social class relations is maintained as a central watermark in

the kind of ethnographic research we are advocating. It involves a shift from ethnography, as a

systematic study of people and cultures designed to explore cultural phenomena by observing

and taking part in social practices from the point of view of the subject of the study herself; to

Marxist critical ethnography as an ethnography with a political purpose to understand what

generates (and/or alternatively can undermine) the conditions in particular empirical realities

and their dynamics in the ruling capitalist class struggle to maintain their hegemony (Maisuria,

2017). This sort of ethnography has an interest in changing things in the interests of the

exploited class in that temporal and spatial context, building-up a momentum for changing

history, to be on the side of many not the few (Malott, 2010).

The point here then is to re-inscribe political critique in ethnographic analyses in order to

address and challenge processes of unfairness or injustice within particular lived domains and

beyond (Madison, 2012). In line with Trondman et al., it is about how the outsider in Walzer’s

advice (1987, p.39) has to become a social critic on the inside who enters imaginatively into

local practices and arrangements not as a marginal observer but as a critic detached from his

(sic) own marginality (Walzer, 1987, p.37). Relatively detached from the marginality in-focus,

such a social criticism strives to move imaginatively in and out of local practices and the

observation of social institutions in order to learn from, represent, translate, demystify and

finally critique and contribute theories and ideas for changing these practices and institutions

in the interests of social transformation (Beach, 2010).

To demystify is crucial. It means basically to unveil the fundamental nature of a relationship

that may otherwise be and remain concealed, complex, inaccessible or ambiguous – and thereby

mystified. Marx forged a template for this in his mature period when he set out to portray

capitalist society in its totality and in terms its fundamental nature, based on the capitalist

relations of commodity production and its exploitation of labour power. At this time modern

capitalist and bourgeois States were in their infancy but Marx nevertheless foresaw that a riddle

was emerging mystifying their modes of production, where the relations between the hostile

classes in society appear to take on the character of things that possess a phantom objectivity.

This was most obvious in the process of commodity production, where-within a class of

workers used their labour power to produce what would become the commodities that were

appropriated for the surplus value that was expropriated by the capitalist class. This process had

and would increasingly in history, Marx asserted, obtained a status of normality as a rational

state of nature; and this mystification of capitalist production also has a corollary in education

according to Beach and Dovemark (2007):

At times the organisational form of education and its correspondences with the

capitalist State are less obvious and more subtle.... Such is the case in current

education provision through independent and State schools at secondary and

upper-secondary levels… These present day school forms are local outcomes of

long national and global processes of development, which was accomplished in

two stages in most European nations/…./First through the development of church

and voluntary organisations and second by the ‘absorption’ of the activities of

these organisations into an expanding public domain as public services, by way

of which the teaching labour originally carried out mainly by women within a

system of kinship relationships and small family groups in the home, but also by

men in association with productive labour, have successively been moved into the

general economy: mainly as female work... This socialisation of labour and the

creation of a new lower-middle class is described as occurring in the previous

century in most European countries, earlier for some and later for others. Current

developments are more in line with a massive habituation of education and the

influx of neo-liberal principles of control. (Beach and Dovemark, 2007, pp1-2)

Beach and Dovemark used Marxist critical ethnography to demystify the role of neoliberal

capitalist relations of production in socio-cultural (re)production in education. Developing their

work in this chapter, we posit demystification as part of an approach that we term ethnographic

explanatory critique. We draw from the philosophy of Critical Realism (see also Maisuria,

2016), and use it to philosophically frame Marxist critical ethnography - this is one of the key

developments that we propose to ethnography in this paper.

Marxist Critical Ethnography for Explanatory Critique

As asserted above the knowledge gained from the treatment of the ethnographic accounts of

empirical reality addresses the Marxist research problematic – what is the possibility, and how

can, critical class consciousness emerge in particular places with their contextually specific

conditions and more generally? It represents kind of critique that goes beyond merely reporting

what is observable about relationships and social class. Its aim is to attain greater analytical

sophistication than this by identifying the dynamics of what makes reality the way it is (Sharp,

Green, and Lewis, 1975, p.25), and would enable radicalism for change to take a foothold in

these circumstances. For instance, there is an abundance of wealth and prosperity today, but

almost all this is concentrated in the hands of a few people – how do these few people maintain

this arrangement as being acceptable. Critical Realism argues that explaining is about

recognising and identifying what exists in the real world, and critique is for understanding the

explanation: explanation and critique are dialectical in this way.

Inspired by critical realism, a particular focus of this proposed analytical sophistication is on

understanding the mechanisms that give rise to the socio-cultural conditions for what can be

observed about class in empirical reality. Mechanisms in this context are deep unobservable

causal structures, reasons or belief systems that have the power to generate tendencies for

qualitative changes to consciousness with implications for action in the lived world.

Explanatory critique thus entails a particular interest in elucidating: i) the mechanisms that

generate the socio-cultural conditions of lived existence through generating dominant

tendencies for particular consciousness forms to emerge and be reinforced and; ii) focusing

upon perceptions of empirical reality that include critical nuances that go against the grain of

mass commons sense, to indicate pivotal moments for struggle in and against the dominant

hegemony. In relation to the Gramscian idea of class struggle in cultural forms, focus on the

lived world is significant as a contribution to Marxist theory building for social transformation

(Maisuria, 2016).

The development of a Marxist ethnography inspired by critical realism thus entails a dialectical

historical materialism that emphasises the complexity of the social world, which it seeks

simultaneously to explain and also critique for emancipatory purposes. This is what we as

Marxists mean by explanatory critique. It is a methodological approach that tries to both explain

how common sense theory and practices are made plausible and credible in specific socio-

cultural contexts, whilst at the same time also being critical of that common sense as a strategic

resource for the ruling class to consolidate the class structure. It is designed to grasp the

conditions that makes it possible for the status quo to be existent and for elucidating socio-

cultural formations that can provide a footing from which to plan strategically against them.

The logic here is that in order to be effective any resistance must be prefigured against an

understanding of the contextual conditional constitution of that which is being resisted. Only

then will emancipation be available as a possibility.

Developing ethnography as a means to facilitate Marxist explanatory critique thus involves

developing and using ethnography in a particular way in conjunction with specific theories to

firstly try to explain how common sense ideas and practices are made to seem both plausible

and credible in a particular socio-cultural context (Maisuria, 2016; 2017), secondly, bringing

scientific critique toward the kind of common sense that becomes manifest and rational in

relation to alienating, exploitative and discriminating practices in everyday life. This is not a

negative understanding of common sense. It means instead understanding common sense to

be a resource and potential strategic context by means of which, in the Gramscian sense, a ruling

class are able to sustain their dominance and the argument of this paper is that this kind of

critique can be an important democratic driving force of educational research and educational

ethnography in the interests of a possibility of empowerment for all (also McLaren, 2000). We

will now present some criteria for this kind of research.

The first criterion is that by virtue of its connections to Marxism there are certain specific

understandings of social class embedded in and essential to this critical ethnography. In

Marxism and Marxist ethnography, social class is much more than a socially constructed

category (Beach, 2010). It refers to lived class positions as part of empirical reality in the

hierarchical relations of commodity production through labour power. This makes the concept

ontological. It is a cultural, historical and material category, not an imaginary social relation or

just a status – as in Weberianism. This articulation forms a main difference between Marxist

theories of class and other theories (Foley, 2002; Malott, 2010; McLaren, 2000; Postone, 2003).

Marx put the issue similarly in chapter 5 of Capital in his writing about wage labour, which he

described as a particular mode of production. It is a mode of production in which labourers sell

their capacity to work to their employers and they in turn covert this into profit, a process

entailing exploitation and the emergence of alienation:

Their commodity, labor-power, the workers exchange for the commodity of the

capitalist, for money, and, moreover, this exchange takes place at a certain ratio…

For 12 hours’ weaving, two shillings (and) thereby) all the other commodities that

I can buy for two shillings… The worker has exchanged his commodity, labor-

power, for commodities of all kinds, and, moreover, at a certain ratio. By giving

him two shillings, the capitalist has given him so much meat, so much clothing,

so much wood, light, etc., in exchange for his day’s work. The two shillings

therefore express the relation in which labor-power is exchanged for other

commodities, the exchange-value of labor-power…

But the putting of labor-power into action -i.e., the work -- is the active expression

of the laborer’s own life, which he sells to another person in order to secure the

necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his

own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labor itself

as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has

auctioned off to another. The product of his activity, therefore, is not the aim of

his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the

gold that he draws up the mining shaft, not the palace that he builds. What he

produces for himself is wages; and the silk, the gold, and the palace are resolved

for him into a certain quantity of necessities of life, perhaps into a cotton jacket,

into copper coins, and into a basement dwelling. And the laborer who for 12 hours

long, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and

so on -is this 12 hours weaving (etc.) regarded by him as a manifestation of life,

as life? Quite the contrary. Life begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at

the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours’ work… has no meaning for him as weaving,

spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at

a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed…

The free laborer… sells his very self... He auctions off eight, 10, 12, 15 hours of

his life, one day like the next, to the highest bidder, to the owner of raw materials,

tools, and the means of life… to the capitalist. The laborer belongs neither to an

owner nor to the soil, but eight, 10, 12, 15 hours of his daily life belong to whom-

so-ever buys them. The worker leaves the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself,

as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as

soon as he no longer gets any use, or not the required use, out of him. But the

worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labor-power, cannot leave

the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own

existence. He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class;

and it is for him to find his man -i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class.

(https://www.marxists.org/encyclopedia/terms/w/a.htm#wage-labour)

The first criterion then relates to understanding the relations of production in terms of their

social meaning and social consequences for classes of individuals in society. The second

criterion relates to the characteristic of conducting ethnography in the interests and services of

a countering the dominant hegemonic ruling class as part of a broad struggle within society.

This is something we have developed from Marx’s (and even more so Gramsci’s) recognition

that economic exploitation is implicit in capitalism and it is driven by cultural production,

which is educative. Thus in order to obtain consent to its exploitative characteristics and

consequences as described above, capitalism also needs to be reinforced by a dominance of

ruling class ideas and values that keep the working class from recognising their oppression,

this is mystification (Maisuria, 2017). The production of these dominant and dominating

ideas, values and relationships prevail in the course of, and in, the manufacture of consent

(Gramsci 1971) but they are at the same time resisted in the hegemonic class struggle called

the war of position by Gramsci as (Gramsci, 1971; Maisuria, 2016, 2017). The war of position

is the constant struggle for control over beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores

of society that enable a particular worldview to become the worldview that is accepted as the

cultural norm and universally valid ideology that justifies the social, political, and economic

status quo as natural, inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone.

Hegemonic class struggle is thus always complex and perhaps, not the least so, in the present

neoliberal historical moment of the 21st century, where relations of production and social

positions become manifest in a multiplicity of integrated forms that in many cases lead people

not to recognise themselves as occupying class positions at all, nor to see societies themselves

as stratified by class relations. In this mystified condition, many ethnographers have abandoned

class analysis and only seek to report and describe societies superficially in terms of socio-

cultural practices rather than attempting to uncover the manifestation of the antagonistic

relations that are necessary for the ruling class hegemony and the production of the ideas and

values that enable the capitalist mode of production to prevail.

Access to higher education is often used to illustrate the decline of the importance of class. The

argument here is that higher education was once the preserve of wealthy capitalist class, but is

now more accessible to others, and is enjoyed irrespective of social background; and even by

the former working class. However there is a strong counter from Marxist analysis to this

miss(ed) recognition of class, and it is to this negation that we turn in our development of

ethnography and explanatory critique. It states that attending university does not mean that the

nature of the relations of production and creation of surplus value have changed. Nor does it

change the fact that the class of people who have to sell their labour remain working class, even

though they may not actually recognise this identity themselves. Although they may call

themselves middle class, the inescapable point is that they still need to sell their labour power

to live. This is not a choice and so class identity in capitalism is still imposed. Complexity

regarding reflexive identity, consciousness, and the sense-of-self that prevails does not negate

the class positions of capitalist and worker that are constituently implicit in the social being and

production activity of humans. As Rikowski states: ‘We are social beings incorporating

antithetical social drivers and forces. This fact sets off contradictions within our lives

(Rikowski, 2001, p.20).

The important point that Rikowski brings attention to here, is that workers have within

themselves the capacity and potential to attain critical class consciousness, meaning that the

exploitation and alienation within the capitalist social relations of production, and the social

practices that maintain it, can become understood as contradictory to self-flourishing.

Contradiction is indicative of a rational kernel of thought that is manifested as a critical nuance

to the common sense of, for example, fairness and equality prevailing: thus in Gramscian terms

representing good sense about class struggle. In dialectical historical materialist terms, this

conveys an ambiguous aspect of our social being that suggests a moment in empirical reality

where consent is at stake and where the possibility exists for transgressing and countermanding

that hegemony (Layder, 1993, p.7-8; Ollman, 2003, p.4).

In modern globalised neoliberal capitalism class struggle is not primarily obvious, explicit and

direct, and this mystification is the reason that we place an emphasis on socio-cultural

discourses that expand and conceal formations of social control based on class advantage and

interests (Malott, 2010). Class is an ontological relation and an aspect of structured reality in

the conditions of material life itself, and for ethnography to be serious and efficacious in

capturing empirical reality, it has to be underpinned by a theoretically robust categorization of

class as ontological, and organise for the production of knowledge in line with this position.

Class is something that exists in the lived world and can be known. As part of historical

materialism class is always temporally and spatially contingent, as classes exist in relation to

each-other and/as an aspect of the development of capitalism and capitalist production relations

(Bourdieu & Eagleton, 1992). The critics of Marxism often forget these basic premises (the

importance of the mode of production and corresponding class structure, and also that class

identities are struggled over in lived cultural forms), or perhaps they are not aware of them

(Bourdieu & Eagleton, 1992), or, alternatively, maybe they just deliberately mystify them

(Beach, 2010). Class cannot be evaded or simply absented (Foley, 2002), at least not without

the loss of grasp on the totality of social relations as suggested above. This is an important point

in relation to the approach that we advocate, which should put a spotlight on class and the way

that it is dynamically manifested in socio-cultural forms materialising in and according to

historical moments (Jordan and Yeomans, 2006).

In terms of the third criterion, the position of Marxist critical ethnography in relation to class

and history thus takes into account and will analyse the transient nature of history, the

formational characteristics of which were initially described by Marx in chapter two of the

German Ideology. This means that serious ethnographies will look for the generative

mechanisms that are causally efficacious for developments and changes in human

consciousness and practices. Put more concretely, the ruling class and their relationship with

others, along with dominant political structures and ways of thinking in society, are founded on

and reflect contemporary neoliberal capitalism, therefore ethnography must be framed by such

knowledge about the political economy to have an effective grasp of empirical reality.

The point being made here is that ethnography should be committed to eschewing a simple

realism and empiricism (Beach and Dovemark, 2007) and that, as succinctly put by Marx,

although people are the makers of their own history, they do not make this history under

conditions they have made for themselves or which they may have freely chosen or have full

control over. They make their histories collectively under circumstances and conditions that

have been inherited from the past and that may weigh like heavily on their intentions and

interactions. It was in relation to lived practical struggles that Marx wrote this famous maxim,

which is worth quoting:

Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do

not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing

already, given and transmitted from the past (Marx, 1852)i.

When Marx wrote this aphoristic expression he considered the then proponents of materialism

to often engender an overly deterministic dogmatic science, whereby humans were merely

products of social structures, and were judged to think and act as structural dopes in the manner

intended by the ruling class (Marx, 1852; Sayer, 2008). In this account of materialism Marx

critically added, history was foreclosed and there was no potential for class struggle, and

therefore revolutionary social transformation was ideologically negated in a manner that was

antithetical to the agential capacity of humans. The materialist doctrine forgets, that as well as

being formed within them, men (sic) also ‘change circumstances’ (Marx, 1969 [1845]). Put

another way, materialism conceived as a deterministic positivistic science of nature, does not

allow for history to change in unpredictable ways (Willis, 2000), nor does it allow for humans

to have a say in the construction of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971).

Marx (1969 [1845]) pointed out these defects in this as part of his Theses on Feuerbach, where

he provides an exegesis in which he makes explicit the potential of human capacity to make

history as individuals and in class formation at the same time as he also pointed out the limits

of human capacity to make history - they do not make it as they please. History is made in

already present historically conditioned circumstances that create the parameters within which

agency is possible (Beach, 2011, Maisuria, 2016; 2017).

In this way Marx provided an antidote to Feuerbach’s materialism, whilst also at the same time

being antithetical to the ahistorical and idealist socio-cultural idea that human agents were

totally free to construct their conditions of existence more or less at as they desired. Materialism

is dialectical and the evolution of history is not straightforward or self-evidently teleological. It

is manifested through an emergent dialectical process of mediation and negation that comprises

a complex totality of dynamics (Maisuria, 2016; Beach, 2011). These include antecedent socio-

cultural forms manifesting in ideas from history (Willis, 2000), humans having some agential

capacity to shape society, and (or perhaps through) a potential to challenge the dominant ideas

and institutional forms and practices of the ruling class of their historical epoch (Banfield, 2015;

Marx, 1969 [1845]; Molyneux, 1995).

The conceptualization of political economic structures and their dialectical relationship to

agentic capacity must be made fundamentally important to ethnography and the way that it

examines, understands and critiques practices and actions in the real world from dominant

tendencies and link mechanisms (Beach, 2010, 2011). At the present time, this implies a serious

recognition of neoliberal forces on the way that individuals live life in terms of (i) an

appreciation of the ontological apprehending of neoliberalism with all its complexity and (ii) a

conceptualization of emergent counter tendencies that act upon the status quo, this is

fundamentally important. Without an ontological appreciation of neoliberalism, ethnography

would only divulge knowledge that would be grossly unclear about how power relations are

constituted by the mode of production in the organisation of class structure. It would be

conducted with an emphasis on symbolic aspects of relations of production alone, which would

prevent the economy from being grasped as a system that acts upon everyday cultural life

contingently and often unpredictably. The conceptualisation of emergent counter-tendencies as

implicit in every dominant tendencies means that change is always possibly and immanent. If

counter tendencies were not conceptualised as such, then the history would be locked in

neoliberalism and no hope of change would exist.

The fourth criterion concerns the concept of the commodity. In Marxism capital is not just a

resource to be acquired, it is instead something that is intrinsic to a system of relations based

on the exploitation of labour in commodity production (Beach, 2010). Commodities have an

intrinsic value which is expressed in exchange value. Disclosing how this operates in concrete

circumstances and on the basis of what forms of power and misrecognition, as stated earlier,

must be a main aim of critical ethnography and indeed critical pedagogical research more

broadly as well (also Malott, 2010; McLaren, 2000). In other words, it is not the exchange of

commodities that regulates the magnitude of their value but rather the magnitude of their value

which controls their exchange proportions. Whom or what controls the magnitude of this value

and by what means become key aspects of explanatory critique (Beach, 2010).

These latter points are not merely academic ones. They have significant implications for an

understanding of causality and ways of grasping and changing the world beyond the limits of

bourgeois thinking and dominant hegemony. Marx’ materialist view of history posits causality

as consisting in vertical and determining and, simultaneously, horizontal and co-determining

relations (Banfield, 2010; Maisuria, 2016).

One element of critique of ethnography that is commonly expressed, and sometimes quite

compellingly so, such as by Martin Hammersley (2006) in the first article in first edition of the

journal of Ethnography and Education, is that ethnography is often weak in terms of using and

contributing to the heuristic development of theory. However, with a focus on class relations

and political economy in empirical reality, Marxist ethnographic explanatory critique would be

capable of this theory-building; especially concerning generative mechanisms of tendencies and

moments of struggle. This goes back again to Marx. Marx was firstly a philosopher, theorist

and historian whose main intention was to analyse and critique social organization in a scientific

way, by creating a methodology for social science. This theory and method perceives human

history to consist of a series of struggles between oppressors and oppressed as the ultimate

driving force of cultural development, which therefore needs empirical and scientific

investigation. There is thus always the necessity of establishing a dialectical relationship

between empirically real knowledge (ethnography) and theory (Marxism) for this reason and

(also) ultimately theory specifically for the purpose of social transformation (Willis, 2000;

Willis and Trondman, 2000).

In Marxist critical educational ethnography the value of theory is often described and written

about in at least two different ways, these were described in Beach (2010). They are on the one

hand, and as suggested already, as a tool for teasing out the patterns of class exploitation in a

given setting from the general texture of everyday life, and, on the other, as compositions of a

semiotic system that can signify the main organizing features, principles or outcomes of

education, within contemporary society, in relation to the vertical dimensions of the relations

of production and their naturalisation. This is done with the help of empirical knowledge that

has been produced through a planned and conscious theoretically informed engagement with

the researched setting (Beach, 2010; Trondman et al., 2017).

In making this statement, and specifically in relation to Banfield (2004, p.53), we recognise the

primary (though not exclusive) importance of the political economy and the need to attend to

it, thus to avoid the risk of falling into an empiricist trap of thinking that knowledge via

observing can merely be reported or can speak for itself, or that fieldwork always lacks the

foundations for some generalization (Foley, 2002). Indeed for knowledge to be useful for

understanding the complexities and dynamics of the totalities and subtleties of the social

universe, what is observed needs to be framed as part of a structural system of neoliberal

capitalism. Within this, moments where the dominant tendencies are questioned or negated also

need to be reconsidered as a struggle against the status quo, which may be minor and passive

or more active and directly participatory (Beach and Dovemark, 2009, 2011). Only observing

the social world will not do for the type of serious ethnography that we advocate. It can only

ever form a segment of what is useful for contributing to theory building and strategizing about

social transformation.

Our approach to developing ethnography is about taking a point of departure in empirical reality

to show relationships between individual consciousness and practices with external (political

economic) circumstances (Malott, 2010), and then establishing dialogue with people in an

attempt to penetrate underneath surface conditions to grasp hidden generative mechanisms that

create dominant conditions for socio-cultural manifestations (Maisuria, 2016). All this is with

a view to create new forms of understanding from experience and to help to change the consent

and acquiescent to the status quo into class conscious and rational forms of action. Thus, in a

similar vein to Freire’s (1970) notion of conscientisation the research treats practical common

sense knowledge as a subject of critical reappraisal in terms of its relationships to the world of

production and as the starting point for social transformation and revolutionary practice

(Allman, 1999; McLaren, 2000). This is why critical consciousness (or conscientisation) is an

important component in Marxist ethnographic explanatory critique, where it is conceptualized

as a pre-requisite to creating the possibility for effective class action against the dominant ruling

class and capitalist hegemony. Class consciousness is about opening-up stabilised and mystified

spheres of rationality for explanation about who wins and who loses from the status quo, thus it

is inherently challenging and critical (Carr, 1995; Maisuria, 2017) when engaging in processes

of discussion, argument, action and debate toward the rational development of social

transformation (Postone, 2003).

This is a statement, that is amongst other things again, about the relations between the level of

the political economy and socio-cultural levels in terms of the primacy of vertical aspects of

determination that are acting both prior to and ‘above’, as well as conterminously with,

horizontal ones of co-determination (Beach, 2011; Willis, 2000). But it is at the same time a

statement about the need to study and theorise in terms of both at the same time and never only

one or the other in isolation (Beach, 2010). There are distinct validity forms for this kind of

research as knowledge that is valid only if it is integrated with and or instigates change that is

sustainable and beneficial to ideologically disadvantaged and materially exploited groups.

Banfield (2004) drew out implications for methodological practice of a critical ethnography of

this kind. They correspond broadly with the criteria we have discussed in the recent pages of

this paper. They are:

The need to hold to a stratified emergent ontology with a materialist view of history and

of social class

Take these structures and generative mechanisms as the object of inquiry

Accept the openness and unpredictability of the social world

Understand events as the outcome of multiple causal processes and contingent aspects

of material history and its social relations

Banfield (2004) used Bhaskar’s (1991) identification of the common failure of social analysis

to maintain the distinction between ontology and epistemology as his starting point (Beach,

2010). The critical realist critique of positivistic philosophy of social science centred on the

problem that it absented ontology, and/or it had been conflated with epistemology (Maisuria,

2016), which was problematic because it provided an inadequate account of the social world as

it existed. Absenting or conflating ontology commonly meant that epistemology was prioritised

and the danger of handing priority to questions of epistemology was that social questions are

conflated into merely theory(ies) of the world. This reduces science to how we might obtain

knowledge of what exists, rather than what does exist in the historical and material and lived

world with all its complexity (Beach, 2010) and creates the possibility for this empirical reality

(Maisuria, 2016). Human society cannot be observed to be scientistically operating with

regularity enabling predictive evolution, as is arguably so for the natural world.

Adopting Marxist realism to drive ethnography in the way that we advocate does not make it

impossible to fall into the trap of the epistemic fallacy, but it does make it difficult to, and it

can help one to find a way out philosophically and practically (Beach, 2010). It involves

providing a challenge to the foundations of conventional social science as a critical tool for

change, by developing a commitment to make science and reflection as available to everyone

as possible within a globalisation of thinking and of affirmative action toward maximising

social and educational equality (McLaren, 2000). It is interested in understanding how the

ruling class builds consent through the State and its cultural/educative institutions.

Consent, as we have argued above, is never secure and there is always the possibility that the

working class can create a progressive counter to the dominant hegemonic ruling culture that

includes norms and values, through collective cultural identities that are produced in(side)

various cultural struggles (McLaren, 2000). Marx’s notion of alienation is broadened here to

include objectifying, alienating, everyday cultural and communicative practices in various

cultural sites, in much the same way that labouring in commodity-producing factories does

(Foley, 2002). For ethnography to be serious and efficacious for change, it should not be de-

politicised into a-historical method that is devoid of theory and afraid to have a purpose

(Trondman et al., 2017). In this paper we begin to alternatively offer a Marxist ethnographic

explanatory critique as a means to uncover and heuristically contribute knowledge about what

generates and sustains classed socio-cultural processes, and (crucially) how they can be undone

for a better world (Beach, 2010; Maisuria, 2017).

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