The thesis of the end of the meta-narratives defended by postmodernism implies the negation of the universality of culture. It is not just the fact that human culture has not yet achieved true universality, and not even the fact that the ruling classes have so far subjected human culture to their own private interests and, to that end, have suffocated and destroyed much of the wealth contained in local cultures. To postmodernism the problem does not reside in the bourgeois vision of human culture, but in the very idea that a universal culture can exist. Postmodernists declare that any educational project based on the idea of the existence or possibility of a universal culture is a conservative, authoritarian, ethnocentric project. This text argues for the thesis that the Marxian conception of the historic process of constitution of the universal human wealth incorporates the theoretical elements necessary to overcome the false option, postulated by the various postmodernist trends, between ethnocentrism and cultural relativism. In Marx, the universalization of human culture in the capitalist society takes place through the universalization of the exchange value of the goods as the fundamental mediation of social relations. It is, therefore, a dialectical process in which the humanization and the alienation of the human genre and of the individuals occur at the same time. The text concludes with the presentation of the challenges that, based on this Marxian conception of universal wealth, must be faced in the process of constructing a Marxist pedagogy.
Cultural relativism; Marxism; Universal wealth; Marxist pedagogy; Postmodernism