Basic Shift

It is particularly important at the present time that adult basic educators reach a critical understanding of the political and economic implications of literacy education and their role in it. When we survey the three periods of responses to illiteracy, we find that they were ushered in by basic shifts in the nature of the capitalist accumulation process: the rise of the factory system, the development of monopoly capitalism, and the rapid economic changes after World War II. The outstanding political economic fact of the present time is a chronic crisis in capitalist economies, including Canada's, in which there is the unprecedented simultaneous occurance of economic stagnation--involving unemployment and lagging output--and ruinous inflation. In the view of many Marxist economists, the present crisis will only be resolved In the long term through a shift in the accumulation process as fundamental as any of the three that we have explored in our historical survey. 1

Different outcomes to this crisis are possible, and no one can foretell which one will prevail. One is foreshadowed in the present conservative offensive, in which the ruling class is attempting to intensify exploitation of the working class (particularly of the large and growing surplus population stratum), through for example, the elimination of what are called "unproductive" government expenditures for education and social welfare. However, an altogether different outcome would result from the success of the working class and its allies in forcing a fundamental reorganization of the Canadian economy along socialist lines.

Each outcome would have profoundly different implications for the future of responses to adult illiteracy. Therefore, adult basic educators can be expected to face mounting pressure to choose in a politically explicit way between the conservative and critical perspectives as the advancing crisis causes the safe 'middle' ground of 'neutrality', as represented in the liberal perspective, to increasingly erode from beneath their feet.

Of course, we must not underestimate the enormous potential recuperative powers of liberalism, as evidenced in its reemergence from the shambles of the Depression in the form of the "New Deal" in the United States. It may yet provide an as yet unglimpsed alternative, perhaps in the form of a transformed welfare capitalism perspective. However, even if this were to be the case, we cannot look to it to supply anything other than what it has offered in the past--a sophisticated reformism which politically and ideologically incorporates the working class while leaving the foundations of capitalism intact.