Quotes from the intro:
Freire also did not hesitate to demonstrate his “just ire” by denouncing the critical posture of many facile liberals and some so-called critical educators who often find refuge in the academy by hiding their addiction to obscene consumerism, while at the same time attacking in their written discourses the market theology of neoliberalism. Too often, these facile liberals and so-called critical educators’ tastes and ways of being in the world and with the world remain, according to Freire, wedded to the very neoliberal market solutions that they denounce at the level of written critical discourse. In their day-to-day practices, these facile liberals and so-called critical educators often betray the action required by praxis by fossilizing their purported political project into an obscure discursive criticality that begs to move beyond the always “postponed arrival” of action – that is, action designed to transform the current perniciousness of the neoliberal Godification of the market into new democratic structures that lead to equity, equality, and authentic democratic practices. In other words, many facile liberals and so-called critical educators boast of their leftist credentials by wearing their proclaimed Marxism on their sleeve (usually only expressed in written discourse or in the safety of the academy) and, sometimes, feel the urge to further boast that, for example, their radicalism beyond Marx’s proposals to the degree that they are authentically more Maoist in their political orientation – a posture they believe to be even more radical. As a consequence, leftist labels in the academy become appropriated, exoticized political and cultural currency where to be a Marxist-in-residence in the ivory tower bestows status but is little more than a chic brand – in reality, the epitome of consumerism sustained by transactions occurring in a merely symbolic register of names and labels that are otherwise vacuous in substance. In essence, the academic branding of “Marxist” by some critical educators turns ethical and political action into a spectacle, and leftist viewpoints into de facto commodities. As commodities, these self-ascribed “radical” positions and labels are emptied out of their progressive content to the extent that they are decoupled from principled action – a decoupling that remains fundamental in the reproduction of the market theology of neoliberalism where collective social engagement based on critical thinking is discouraged and zealous cutthroat competition is rewarded. The insidious process of decoupling critical discourse and action legitimizes not “walking the talk”: it affords the proclaimed Marxist-in-residence the opportunity, for instance, to claim to be antiracist while turning antiracism into a lifeless cliché that does not provide pedagogical spaces to critique white supremacist ideologies. In this process, their progressive stances are often co-opted, mobilized only to the degree that they denounce racism at the level of written critical discourse, all the while reaping privileges from the cemented institutional racism which they, willfully, refuse to acknowledge and engage in action to dismantle.
