There is a sense in which all Marxist literature, and indeed all literature on Marxism, is a series of footnotes to this endlessly controversial insight Marx developed: that the ideological superstructure is the direct result (in Easton and Guddat's translation of The German Ideology: 1967:414) of the material base. This has become known as a kind of reductionism because, to some extent, the richness of all human sociocultural phenomena, including all political and other 'super' structures, are thought to be reducible to economic wealth. In this analysis, who owns the wealth owns the prevalent ideologies we almost all take, mistakenly, to be self-supporting, and self-justifying. Epigrammatically, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.
Brosio grapples with reductionism right through his book, which is written from within the Marxist tradition of political economy. He is pessimistic about the prospect of democracy ever making much impact on education in capitalist societies like that of the United States of America: indeed, he assumes democracy and capitalism are 'conflicting imperatives', with schooling caught in the tension between these imperatives. Because of the hegemonic nature of capitalism (that is, that the ruling ideas are those of the wealthy, ruling class), and its pervasive and ubiquitous expression through the principal organs of society and the State, Brosio believes this tension is unbalanced -the scales are tipped well and truly against democracy and in favour of capitalism. Hence his pessimism.
But notice the illogicality of Brosio's position. On the one hand, as a Marxist, he must agree that some version of the 'reductionist' thesis is viable, on pain of denying the explanatory force of class analysis. His book relies throughout on the continued existence of some form of populist polity as the historically-hallowed agents of radical political change, even if this polity is not the traditional 'working class' narrowly conceived. Put briefly, he recognises, and tries to avoid, the futility of an economic determinism that can only endorse political quiescence. However, on the other hand, and also as a Marxist, he clearly assumes even in the very title of the book, that 'radical democracy' is sufficiently ideologically distinct from the hegemonic ideological superstructure supported by capitalist economics, to make it a conflictual relationship.
Brosio is caught between a rock and a hard place. In assuming an ideological polarisation (between democracy and capitalism), he sets up some extraordinarily demanding expectations of social and political change. He is fully entitled to