English and Marx's 'general intellect': The construction of an English-speaking élite in Rwanda

The Rwandan government mandated in 2008 that its education system would cease to be French-medium, and instead become English-medium. Both the government and the media have represented this decision as economically-motivated: specifically, it has been claimed that an English-speaking workforce will be necessary to compete on the world stage. But the relationship between the politics of language in transnational capitalism and Rwandan language policy has yet to be analysed from a critical Marxist perspective.

The purposes of this article are two-fold. By engaging with Virno (2007) and Ives' (2016) rearticulations of Marx's theory of the ‘general intellect,’ it aims to demonstrate that this concept necessarily includes an engagement with English in the context of cognitive capitalism. In applying the concept of ‘general intellect’ to the dynamics of ‘global’ English, this piece attempts to elucidate the role of the capitalist system in encouraging the spread of English, with a focus on the Rwandan context. This article demonstrates that Rwanda's education system has been reorganised according to the particular form of the ‘general intellect’ that is required by transnational capital. Specifically, this framework casts English as a particularly important cognitive skill. Crucially, Marx's theory allows us to discuss the construction of ‘selective intellectuality’ in Rwanda, and to demonstrate that this entails the reproduction of class-based hierarchies determined in part by access to capital, and access to English.