Article: Neoleninism in Post-democracy (in German)

Micha Brumlik is the author of an article titled "Neoleninismus in der Postdemokratie" (Neoleninism in Post-democracy), published in the monthly German magazine "Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik" (literally, "Pages for German and International Politics"; 8/2010: pp. 105-16):

www.blaetter.de/archiv/jahrgaenge/2010/august/neoleninismus-in-der-postdemokratie

Abstract in English (found online and apparently provided by the magazine): "What do Joachim Gauck's candidacy for German President and the 'Communism Congress' at Volksbühne Berlin [both in June 2010] have in common? Both represent the longing for alternatives in 'Post-democracy'. Micha Brumlik, Professor of Pedagogy at the University of Frankfurt on the Main and co-editor of the Blätter, criticises Alain Badiou's and Slavoj Zizek's undemocratic 'neo-leninism'."

Here too, I had no access to the full text of the article.

Book: Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China

Anne-Marie Brady, "Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007):

www.rowmanlittlefield.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0742540588

Publisher's description: "China's government is no longer a Stalinist-Maoist dictatorship, yet it does not seem to be moving significantly closer to democracy as it is understood in Western terms. After a period of self-imposed exclusion, Chinese society is in the process of a massive transformation in the name of economic progress and integration into the world economy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is seeking to maintain its rule over China indefinitely, creating yet another 'new' China. Propaganda and thought work play a key role in this strategy. In this important book, noted China scholar Anne-Marie Brady answers some intriguing questions about China's contemporary propaganda system. Why have propaganda and thought work strengthened their hold in China in recent years? How has the CCP government strengthened its power since 1989 when so many analysts predicted otherwise? How does the CCP maintain its monopoly on political power while dismantling the socialist system? How can the government maintain popular support in China when the uniting force of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology is spent and discredited? What has taken the place of communist ideology? Examining propaganda and thought work in the current period offers readers a unique understanding of how the CCP will address real and perceived threats to stability and its continued hold on power. This innovative book is a must-read for everyone interested in China's growing role in the world community."

Reviews: "Anne-Marie Brady has written a timely book about the Chinese media. She has done much to demystify an understudied topic. [...] Brady's work deserves much admiration." (Ashley Esarey, "The China Journal")

"[T]he surface diversity of the Chinese media hides the guiding hand of a high-level Party office in Beijing called the Central Propaganda Department, which works its will across the whole spectrum of activities in media, education, entertainment – [...] what Brady calls a campaign of mass distraction." ("New Republic")

The book is fully searchable on Google Book Search (including table of contents):

http://books.google.com/books?id=uj-1sxeO99kC&printsec=frontcover

Anne-Marie Brady is Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Canterbury.

Book: After democracy (in French)

Of possible interest to those able to read books in French: "Après la démocratie" (After democracy) by Emmanuel Todd (Gallimard, October 2008):

www.gallimard.fr/catalog/Html/clip/A78683/A78683.swf

Review: "Emmanuel Todd, the French historian, made a name for himself by predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union. [...] In his latest book, [...] he conjures up the alarming possibility of a post-democratic Europe reverting to ethnic scapegoating and dictatorship. Mr Todd's thesis will strike many readers as nonsense. In particular, his conclusion that only overt protectionism can preserve Europe's social fabric has already been attacked for being dangerously counter-productive. After all, was it not the reversion to protectionism after the crash of 1929 that tipped the world into the Great Depression and fuelled the rise of Hitler? Yet some of Mr Todd's arguments are as insightful as they are polemical, and reflect the evolution of Europe's political debate. His warnings of a democratic meltdown in France, and perhaps more generally in the developed world, certainly deserve to be read, challenged and debated." (John Thornhill, "Financial Times")

From the publisher's description (my rough translation): "Beneath a variety of symptoms, we encounter a veritable crisis of democracy. In order to understand it, we must identify the contributing factors, both present and historical, including the emptiness of religion, educational stagnation, the new social stratification, the destructive impact of free trade, the impoverishment of the middle class, confusion of the elite. [...] We have to ask ourselves if politicians, unable to manipulate our 'opinion democracy' any longer, will not simply seek to curtail the universal franchise."

Emmanuel Todd is a Research Engineer at France's National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED). A political scientist by training, he holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge.

Article: Is 'School Effectiveness' Anti-Democratic?

Terry Wrigley, "Is 'School Effectiveness' Anti-Democratic?" ("British Journal of Educational Studies", 51 [2], June 2003: pp. 89-112):

www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a917185419&db=all

Abstract: "This paper explores the connections between School Effectiveness as a research paradigm and developments in policy and practice. With a particular focus on the English school system, 'effectiveness' is examined as a discourse which underpins the accountability regime, and in terms of its influence on the related field of School Improvement. Anti-democratic tendencies in areas such as school leadership, teacher professionalism, curriculum and pedagogy are related to a failure, at the heart of the 'effectiveness' concept, to give critical consideration to social and educational aims."

Excerpts: "In Britain, perhaps more than elsewhere, educational change has been driven by School Effectiveness. This reductionist mode of research claims scientific status by replacing sociological and pedagogical analysis with increasingly complex statistics [...]. It resolutely avoids questions of educational aims, reducing all sense of purpose to the attainment of higher test scores. We have almost reached the stage where what cannot be measured simply does not count. [...] School effectiveness (as research, policy and ideology) is part of a package, and needs to be explored within a [...] dense forest of high stakes testing, league tables, accountability, teacher competences, performance pay, performance review, an increasing emphasis on education as the production of human capital, curricula imposed from above, and, under New Labour, government-imposed teaching methods, the restoration of selection and accelerating privatisation. [...]

"We are dealing with a nexus of mutually reinforcing structural and cultural effects; the combined result is anti-democratic because: i. it creates illusions of being able to overcome through education the disadvantages brought about by an increasingly polarised society – a new version of the Victorian 'self-made man' myth; ii. it actively penalises those who are teaching and learning in marginalised communities; iii. it trivialises learning, making it increasingly difficult to think through the world we live in and understand the powerful forces which structure our lives; iv. it narrows our discourse for thinking about education and its goals; v. it limits the scope of teachers to provide curricula which make sense to working-class and minority ethnic pupils, or indeed other pupils who may have difficulty in their learning; vi. it increases the asymmetry of communication between teachers and learners; vii. it deprofessionalises teachers, and undermines the collegiality and reflection needed for teachers to take schools in new directions and respond to learners’ needs; viii. it gives headteachers illusory power, within a wider game in which they are increasingly dancing to someone else's tune."

Terry Wrigley is now a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Article: The Failure of Democracy in Africa

Mukui Waruiru's article "The Failure of Democracy in Africa", published on 31 October 2007 online in "Taki's Magazine", voices a sentiment that I have personally heard expressed by other black Africans too.

www.takimag.com/site/article/the_failure_of_democracy_in_africa/

Excerpts: "Pure democracy is a system that works well in particular cultures, and not all cultures are equally capable of building harmonious democratic societies. [...] [In] Sub-Saharan Africa, [...] the introduction of pure democracy 50 years ago resulted in disaster for the people of the region. [...] If anything, in many countries, Africans enjoyed greater personal freedom and prosperity under colonial rule, than they do today under independent governments. [...] Putting restrictions on the vote using poll taxes, literacy tests, and property ownership qualifications, has helped many Western nations to preserve liberty and order for centuries. [...] Universal suffrage is a very recent development in the West. [...] Given that Britain and the US took so long to build well-functioning democratic systems, it is unrealistic to expect African nations to have set up successful democratic societies, given the high poverty rates and the low levels of civilization of most of the population. [...]

"Ian Douglas Smith, the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, [...] was falsely labeled as a racist and white supremacist [...], unlike the architects of apartheid in neighboring South Africa, [...] Smith recognized that the low levels of education and cultural development of most of the blacks, made the establishment of a successful pure democracy a difficult undertaking. [...] Facing a possible future of either a Marxist dictatorship or anarchy, the Rhodesian leadership declared independence and prevented Britain from imposing majority rule in the colony. [...] Blacks were allowed to have 16 seats in the 66 member Rhodesian parliament, [...] [e]ventually, white and black Rhodesians would share power in the Rhodesian Parliament, under a 50-50 arrangement. [...] But the international community would not accept anything less than black majority rule. [...] Smith can accurately be described as a prophet, because he predicted disaster for Rhodesia [now called Zimbabwe] once it came under the control of the communist terrorist, Robert Mugabe."

Mukui Waruiru is the founder of the African Conservative Forum, a Christian human rights and public policy organization based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Article: The Anti-Democratic Curriculum of High-Stakes Testing

A new journal, "Critical Education", launches with an article on "The Idiocy of Policy: The Anti-Democratic Curriculum of High-Stakes Testing" by Wayne Au (1 [1], January 2010).

The article can be read free of charge at this link:

http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/criticaled/article/viewFile/60/121

Abstract: "Making use of the body of literature outlining the various controlling aspects of high-stakes testing on classroom practice, the analysis presented here finds that vertical hierarchies are both established and maintained through the top-down structure of education policies in the United States, as exemplified by the No Child Left Behind Act. By looking at the effects of such policies through Parker's (2005) discussion of key aspects of democratic education, this article finds that educational policies based upon systems of high-stakes, standardized testing represent a curriculum that teaches anti-democracy."

Some excerpts: "[P]olicies centered upon systems of high-stakes standardized testing [...] have been advanced upon a consistent rhetoric of democracy, couched in terms of individual choice, individual equality, equal opportunity for achievement [...].

"Indeed, high-stakes tests hold so much power because their results are tied, by policy, to rewards or sanctions that can deeply affect the lives of students, teachers, principals, and communities. [...]. The power in this model, then, is located in the upper echelons of institutional bureaucracies that maintain the authority to determine the assessment, determine the criteria for what counts as passing or failing, and determine the sanctions and punishments for those that do not meet their criteria for passing. [...]

"[E]ducators and students alike are essentially being 'taught' a curriculum that is anti-democratic. This can be seen in the various ways teaching and learning have been restructured [...] to control teachers, to restrict diversity, and to ignore local contexts and voices. [...] The current hegemony of high-stakes testing [...] also undermines democratic thinking more generally by narrowing the conversations that students, teachers, and communities can engage in as potentially active participants in the content and direction of schooling relative to broader social relations." (italics removed)

"Critical Education" is an international peer-reviewed journal, published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies and based at the University of British Columbia.

Wayne Au is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Secondary Education at California State University, Fullerton.