Keywords

Creeping Fascism: Critical, Socialist and Marxist Education and Educators Under Attack

Critical Education, questioning power relationships throughout society and proposing/working for egalitarian alternatives are under global assault in this current era of neoconservative/neoliberal/neo-fascist right-wing authoritarianism. Capitalist individuals, think tanks, organizations and governments are seeking to dilute, expel or criminalize socialist, Marxist, anti-nationalist education, particularly in schools’ and universities’ curricula- and activity. Currently and historically, the neo-conservatives and neo-/actual Fascists also target LGBT, feminist and anti-racist writing, teaching and thought (Faulkner et al., 2021; Hill, 2019a).

However, in this current, early twenty-first century era, critical education, questioning power relationships throughout society and proposing/working for egalitarian alternatives, are under spectacular assault in this current era of neoconservative/neoliberal/neo-fascist right-wing authoritarianism. This is/has been so from Trump’s USA, and, in many states of the USA, in post-Trump USA, to Johnson’s England and Wales, to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, to Erdogan’s Turkey, to the Law and Justice Party government in Poland, to Modi’s India, to Orban’s Hungary and to the Ukraine. In each, powerful forces are seeking to dilute, expel or criminalize socialist, Marxist, anti-nationalist education—particularly in the schools’ and universities’ curricula- and activity. One of the most notable is the policy of the Bolsonaro quasi-/would-be Fascist government in Brazil, promising during his 2018 election campaign to ‘enter the education ministry with a flamethrower to remove Paulo Freire’ (Woods, 2020).

The iron fist of Capital and its structures severely limit resistant ‘agency’, punishing, restricting, illegalizing, dismissing, for example, trade union and Left political activists and, their Left, anti-capitalist beliefs. As one example, in September 2020, schools in England were told by the Department (Ministry) for Education not to use material from anti-capitalist groups, with anti-Capitalism categorized as an ‘extreme political stance’ equivalent to endorsing illegal activity (Busby, 2020). As left-wing Labour MP John McDonnell responded: ‘On this basis it will be illegal to refer to large tracts of British history and politics including the history of British socialism, the Labour Party and trade unionism, all of which have at different times advocated the abolition of capitalism’ (Busby, 2020). As another example, in Poland, the possession of Marx’s Capital is punishable with three-year imprisonment (Stańczyk, 2021). In Turkey, many leftists and Marxist educators were dismissed and lost social and public rights, including their passports, following the failed July 2016 coup (in which they were not involved) against President Erdogan, and currently, in 2021, governments in both Greece and Turkey are attempting to assert further control over universities.

While it is true that the ideological apparatuses of the state (Althusser, 1971) (such as Ministries of Education and school and university governing bodies) have, in their ideological and their repressive functions, to varying degrees, sought to marginalize, contain, vilify, destroy Marxist (and, indeed Left social democratic programs such as those of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders) at this current juncture we are witnessing, suffering from an intensification of ideological repression. The harassment and dismissals of Marxist educators and activists are ratcheting up in country after country.

Three Types of Socialist Education, Three Types of Critical Education

In this chapter, I am not discussing conservative-technicist or liberal pluralist/‘neutrality in the classroom’ versions of critical education. Instead, I critically analyze three types of Left critical education.

‘Centrist’ social democrats want to reform education (to make it a bit fairer, a bit more meritocratic, with some positive discrimination).

More Left, democratic socialists, or ‘left social democrats/ left reformists’, such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, also want to reform education to make education—but to make it much fairer, with pronounced positive discrimination to help ‘under-achieving groups’.

Revolutionary Marxists, that is to say, Marxists who wish to replace Capitalism with socialism, want an education critical of Capitalism, an education for social, political and economic transformation, into a socialist economy and society. My own writing, much of which is online at http://www.ieps.org.uk/publications/online-papers-dave-hill/, is from a Revolutionary Marxist political and also from a Classical Marxist theoretical perspective, that is, referring to Marx and Engels, not just their interpreters). I argue for a Marxist education policy (e.g., Edwards et al., 2018; Hill, 2010, 2015, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c), focusing on Marxist education, differentiating it from other versions of Critical Education.

Centrist’ Social Democrats and Left Social Democrats/Democratic Socialists and Education

Social democrats have advanced policies intended to make the system more ‘meritocratic’, with ‘equal opportunities’ policies involving positive discrimination for under-represented groups (in particular, the poorer sections of the working class and particular ethnic groups), with academic and scholastic advancement and future positions in the labor market purportedly resulting from ‘effort plus ability’, that is, merit. For entry, however, into what is a grossly unequal society.

Traditional social democratic education systems are those such as in Sweden and Finland, and the reforms of the Wilson Labour government in England and Wales in the 1960s and 70s. Wilson widely (if not universally in the state system—private schools remained outside the state system)—established comprehensive/common schooling, and grants to help children from poorer families (such as me, and such as my grandson) (‘Education Maintenance Grants’) stay on at school and also, to go to university. (There were no university tuition fees for ‘domestic’ students until 1998.) Policies such as smaller class sizes for the lower attainers, and residential education centers and ‘cultural trips’ were widespread, from all of which I benefited and recall, as a school student, a teacher, and as a local councillor. At the post-school level, free adult education was ubiquitous for leisure as well as vocational ‘further education’, and the Open University was set up in 1969 whereby people from working-class backgrounds who had left school at the minimum school-leaving age, or at the age of 18/19, could study for a degree (primarily by distance learning), free of fees, while still at work.

At various stages in various countries, all types of socialists attempted, at various times, to make the schooling curriculum more inclusive and ‘relevant’ to different communities and classes. The Community Schools movement, particularly strong in England between the 1970s and the 1990s, attempted to make schools more central to local communities, by developing Community Schools—to ‘lessen the distance’ between schools and their working-class communities. The ‘Community Schools’ Movement, ‘seeks to obliterate the boundary between school and community, to turn the community into a school and the school into a community’ (Halsey, 1972, p. 79). As did the much overlooked ‘Hargreaves Report’ into secondary education in the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA, 1984, summarized in Doe, 1984).

However, sociologists of education over the last 70 years, and communists and socialists since before then (see Simon e.g., 1978); Floud et al. (1957) and, more recently, Stephen Ball (2003), Jean Anyon (2011) and Diane Reay (2018), have pointed out the enduring myth of meritocracy in schooling systems. Marxist reproduction theorists from early Soviet writers Bukharin and Preobrazhensky (1922/1969) to contemporary Marxist theorists such as Glenn Rikowski (passim) and Dave Hill (passim) drawing to an extent on Althusser (1971), Bowles and Gintis (1976), Bourdieu and Passeron (e.g., 1977), have for many decades pointed out that the education system is purposefully and intentionally rigged in favor of the elite capitalist class, in favor of class reproduction.

Marxist theorists (and activists), together with social democratic theorists and activists also agree that within the working class, the ‘middle class’ strata secure ‘positional advantage’—the ‘better schools and universities’ (better grades/exam results), compared to the ‘working class’, the less advantaged, poorer strata of the working class, within which particular racialized ethnic and gendered groups achieve less than others and are subjected to far greater levels of oppression and discipline—racism, sexism, homophobia—than other groups.

Such social democratic reforms, though usually focusing on pedagogy and curriculum, have been advanced by Critical Pedagogues, such as Henry Giroux (e.g., 1983, 2001), and also by what I consider to be ‘Marxian’ educators’ such as the very influential Michael W. Apple (e.g., 2006), and his co-thinkers such as Ken McGrew (e.g., 2011). These can be considered to be democratic socialist, wishing teachers to be committed to anti-racist, social justice teaching, and to developing teachers as ‘transformative intellectuals’ seeking a fairer society. Such Left social democrats, or democratic socialists, want substantial reform (of the wider economic, penal, political, welfare systems, and in education, more equal chances—provision, funding, attainment).

Foley et al. (2015) point out that ‘critical pedagogy has entered the mainstream in the United States, with over 7000 titles alone which address the topic offered on the major book retailer Amazon.com’. Drawing from Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, and seeking to apply Freire, critical pedagogues seek to transform consciousness and teach for social justice. As compared with more Structuralist neo-Marxists, Culturalist neo-Marxists, such as proponents and writers on Critical Pedagogy see greater space for the autonomy of individuals, groups and institutions/organizations (such as teachers, schools, Local Authorities) to engage in resistant practices, anti-hegemonic praxis. Critical Pedagogy has been praised and practiced widely.

However, McLaren, for example (2000) notes that Critical Pedagogy (as opposed to his own Revolutionary—that is, Marxist—Critical Pedagogy),

... at least in classrooms throughout the United States) (is) little more than liberalism refurbished with some lexical help from Freire (as in words like praxis and dialogue) and basically is used to camouflage existing capitalist social relations under a plethora of eirenic proclamations and classroom strategies. (McLaren, 2000, p. xxv, For similar critique, see also; Gonzalez & Rikowski, 2019; McLaren, 2016; Stańczyk, 2021)

This is not at all, to demean the efforts of those millions of teachers and educators globally attempting to work for a critical citizenry and for social justice in classrooms and seminar rooms/lecture theaters and online, nor the compilers of the various compendia/edited collections on Critical Pedagogy.

What Critical pedagogues such as Giroux, and ‘Marxian’ educators such as Apple do not want is Marxist revolution, the replacement of Capitalism and Capitalist education by socialism. (For a discussion between Revolutionary anti-capitalist Marxist Educators and ‘Marxian’ or left reformist/Educators, see; Banfield (2015), Farahmandpur (2004), Hill (2009), Kelsh and Hill (2006), McLaren (2010, 2013), Rikowski (2006, 2019); on the one hand and Apple (2006), and McGrew (2011) on the other). Anyon (2011) labels Revolutionary Marxists as ‘traditional Marxist’ and left social democrats such as Michael W. Apple as ‘neo-Marxist’.

Classical Marxists critique neo-Marxisms, though like Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, welcome reforms, without being reformist (see, e.g., Hill, 2021; Lenin, 1902/1999; Luxemburg, 1899/1999). To return to an earlier—and important—argument, it is not just the Capitalist state apparatuses (and those apparatuses supporting the capitalist state, such as the media) that discipline the working class—it is also the economic warfare, the brute force and power of the Capitalist Class in the domain of labor, employment, wage suppression and repression, immiseration. This is one instance of where Classical Marxist analysis is in disagreement with neo-Marxist analyses. Where the barrel of the gun ordered by the capitalist class crushes the relative autonomy of resistance. Where Overdetermination is trumped by Economic Determination.

My critique of the neo-Marxist Althusser (Hill, 2001) was of Althusser’s formulation that Economic Determination in the Last Instance means, ‘in the last “overdetermined” analysis’ (Althusser, 1962). Although Althusser did admit ‘economic determination in the last instance’, he added the important—and in my view, negating, qualification that, in overdetermined form, ‘its bell never tolled’ (my italics). The analysis I am presenting here is that the bell of economic determination is indeed now tolling.

Five Aspects of Marxist Education

Revolutionary Marxists, that is, Marxists who are anti-capitalist and wish to see Capitalism replaced by socialism, want an education system that is not only ‘free’ (from fees) from early childhood through life, but is a system with well-trained/educated teachers who are well-paid and valued in society, with a Marxist school and higher/university education curriculum that exposes Capitalism and inequalities, argues for socialism and values solidaristic as opposed to competitive individualistic school activities. In a Marxist education system, all schools and universities, including private ones, would be brought under local accountable democratic control. There would be no private schools or colleges/universities, no possibility for the wealthy to purchase educational advantage for their children.

The Questions Marxist Educators Ask

In schools, colleges, universities, many radical and Marxist critical educators try, in addition to seeking dramatic increases in funding, to affect five aspects of learning and teaching, asking questions about (at least) five aspects of education. These relate to: (i) Curriculum and Assessment, (ii) Pedagogy, (iii) Organizational Culture within the School/Institution, (iv) Organization of The Education System and of Students, that is, comprehensive schooling or selective schooling and (v) Ownership and Control of Schools/Colleges/Universities.

These questions are common to many types of radical educator, from liberals to social democrats and democratic socialists, not simply Marxists. Below, therefore, I add what is specifically Marxist about these five aspects of education policy and praxis (see Hill, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c).

(i) Curriculum and Assessment

A first question Marxist and other critical educators ask is what should be in the curriculum? A related question is, ‘who should decide?’ Should the curriculum be a curriculum for conformity—to create conformist and dutiful workers and citizens, devoid of ‘deep critique’ (of existing society for example). Should it be ‘a white, male, middle class curriculum’, uninfluenced by decolonization theory, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and feminisms? Or, as Marxists propose and practice, should it be a curriculum for reform and revolution, where curriculum areas/subjects (or cross-disciplinary projects/themes) focus on inequalities, resistance, transformation, the collective good, not on individualistic consumerism, on environmentalism not capitalist ecocide. Thus, geography would include a focus on social geography, science on the social implications of science, and history and literature and the arts would encompass (white/black, male/female) working-class history and novels/plays exposing (‘race’, gender, social class, for example) injustice and promoting socialism and communism. The curriculum would be decolonized and revolutionized. It would be anti-racist, anti-sexist, environmentalist, Marxist. (It would also develop subject-specific concepts, skills, knowledge.)

Marxist educators, indeed critical educators in general, can, with students, look at the curriculum and ask, ‘What do you/ we think should be in the curriculum that is currently absent?’ ‘Who benefits and who loses from this curriculum’? What ‘messages’ come from this curriculum, about, for example, power, protest, individualism, collectivity/collectivism, Black Lives Matter, Generation X and environmentalism, sexism and misogyny, sexuality and class oppression and exploitation. Where Marxists and Revolutionary Critical Educators (McLaren, 2010, 2013) differ from more social democratic, democratic socialist and liberal critical educators are in the emphasis placed on resistance, activism and socialist transformation—and on social class analysis.

Regarding Assessment, what is assessed is usually what teachers focus on. It can be restricted to subject knowledge and skills, or it can assess more widely. The (social democratic) Hargreaves Report about schooling in the left-dominated Inner London Education Authority (Doe, 1984; ILEA, 1984), for example, proposed that indices of pupil achievement include not only exam results but also pupils’ achievements in areas such as problem-solving, personal and social skills, and motivation and commitment. Furthermore, it recommended that pupils/students be given a real say in school policies such as the curriculum and exams.

Elsewhere (e.g., Edwards et al., 2018) I set out a Manifesto for Teacher Education, partly drawing on an attempt I developed and led as a Marxist teacher education course leader. Many of these proposals are supported by other reform and social justice groups. But taken together, they offer a sustained challenge to neoliberal/neoconservative, pre-/proto/quasi fascist Capitalism.

(ii) Pedagogy

Many Marxist (and other critical) educators question the overwhelming teacher-centered pedagogy, the pattern of teaching and learning relationships and interaction, what Freire termed ‘the banking model’ of education. Instead, using Freirean perspectives and praxis, they try to use democratic participative pedagogy which can break down, to some extent, patterns of domination and submission and is a pedagogy that listens to children’s, students’ and local communities’ voices. This is a pedagogy that bases teaching and learning on the concerns and issues in everyday life, in life as experienced by the learners. Furthermore, it is a collaboration between teachers and students, teachers and pupils. Here, learning is collaborative, not individualistic and competitive. It is a pedagogic system—pattern of learning and teaching relationships—that is collective, collaborative, mutually supportive.

In addition to ‘democratic participative collaborative pedagogy’, Critical Marxist educators use different types of pedagogy in teaching, to engage in non-hierarchical, democratic, participative, teaching and research. Vygotsky (e.g., 1934), as a Marxist, was inspired by Marx’s dialectic in that it rejects top-down and bottom-up accounts of the learning process—these unidirectional models originate in class-based societal relations which Marxists reject.

In England, pedagogy in primary (elementary) school teaching has become removed, to an extent, from the control of teachers. Following the 1998 National Literacy Strategy (NLS) (DfEE, 1998), a specific teaching and learning strategy was advised—and was surveilled and inspected for more than a decade, its prescriptions still felt. Across the subject curriculum, lessons followed a standard four-part pattern—introduction, lecture/explanation/teacher teaching, pupil/student discussion/work, plenary. No room for Freirean, Vygotskyan, or liberal-progressive child-centered teaching and learning, no room for the ‘dead cat flying through the window’ syndrome, whereby teachers and pupils/students could seize upon a happening event, to explore. And no room for extended group interdisciplinary focus and analysis of a particular problem or social event, the type of school-teaching and teaching as a teacher educator that I engaged in between the late 1960s and the late 1980s. Instead, ‘there is no time’—the curriculum is full (of content designed by conservative think-tanks, advisers and Ministers) (Hill, 1994, 1997; Jones, 2003).

To return to questions of pedagogy, of course, critiques of over-dominant teacher-centered pedagogy are not restricted to Marxist educators. They are also made by liberal-progressive, child/student-centered educators, anarchist educators and by some conservative educators, concerned about teaching effectiveness and preparation for the workplace. And, following Gramsci, Marxist teachers, by virtue of their social and ideological role in actually teaching, in actually carrying out the role of teacher, should maintain an authoritative stance where appropriate. There is room for class teaching and lectures as well as dialogic and discussion-based learning, and learning based on an individual’s or a community’s needs.

Marxist educators differ between themselves (as do conservative educators) on the degree to which education is or should be proselytizing, for example, praising ‘the revolution’, and the degree to which it is/should be ‘critical’—(including ‘auto-critique’) criticizing/critiquing not just Capitalism and inequality, but also the current and alternative ideologies, policies and praxis. There is a spectrum across different times and places from authoritarian to democratic pedagogy, from some Communist states in particular periods, to some insurgent movements.

My own Classical Marxist theoretical analysis and Revolutionary Marxist praxis, developing from a huge personal and a theorized awareness of class inequality and resistance, attempts a synthesis of Vygotskyan, Freirean and Gramscian pedagogy. My own early praxis as a young schoolteacher (at Stockwell Manor Comprehensive School in Brixton in Inner London) took place during the relatively liberal-progressive, child-centered period of education in England of the late 1960s and early 1970s—before Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech of 1976 started the process of yanking back education into fulfilling primarily economic and vocational aims, a process carried out to fruition and completion following the Thatcher and Major governments of 1979–1987. This was also a time of socialist teaching and curriculum development in some state schools, at a time when there was no national curriculum, schools and teachers were able to develop their/our own curricula. The sheer hatred expressed by Conservative party/politicians, and media of both liberal-progressive and attempts at socialist egalitarian critical education is described in books by Ken Jones (1989, 2003), and in my own writing, (such as Hill, 1997), which detail Conservative politicians’ reactions to and sheer venom directed at liberal child-progressive as well as at social democratic and socialist education, and their determination to crush them all. Conservative legislation—the 1988 Education Reform Act, and its introduction of a compulsory and rigidly surveilled/inspected National Curriculum for schools, and national curriculum for teacher training of 1991/1992 saw the removal of many left teachers and teacher educators from their posts. I was one of many teacher educators dismissed/‘made redundant’ following the removal of most sociological, political and psychological aspects of teacher education courses through these revised teacher education criteria of 1991/1992, their removal being justified on grounds of ‘the need to prioritise the practical over the theoretical’ (Hill, 1994, 1997, 2003).

(iii) Organizational Culture Within the School/University/Institution

A third question for education relates to the social relations and power relations between management and shop-floor education workers, that is, between the school/university head, principal, director and the teachers and lecturers (and ancillary staff). It also concerns the ‘hidden curriculum’ of head teacher/Principal—teacher–pupil/student relationships, demands and expectations.

Is the school culture democratic and collegiate, or is it dictatorial and authoritarian? Prior to the diversification of state education into City Technology Colleges, Academies, teachers and head teachers were employed by local education authorities, the democratically elected local councils. There were national pay scales, no individual pay bargaining and seeking Performance Related Pay, and no head teachers earning far more than the Prime Minister, as is the case with some head teachers of Academies and Directors of Academy Chains. As with other sectors of the quasi and part-state provision, with New Public Managerialism, the difference in pay and emoluments between those at the top and the shop-floor workers such as teacher and lecturers has ballooned.

Globally, and in the UK, where neoliberalism has triumphed in education, common results have been increased casualization of academic labor, increased proletarianization, increased pay and conditions differentials within education sectors, cuts in the wages/salaries (as well as in ‘the social wage’ of state benefits and rights), payment by results/performance-related pay, cuts to school and further and higher education budgets, increased intensification of labor, with larger classes, decreased autonomy for school and college teachers over curriculum and pedagogy, being subject to the surveillance and rigors of ‘new public managerialism’, increased levels of monitoring and report-writing, and accompanying increased levels of stress, increased concern with timekeeping and tighter and more punitive discipline codes. There is also the curtailment of trade union rights and attacks on trade unions as organizations that defend and promote working-class interests.

This is a far cry from the occasional more collegiate approach to school democracy and management of the more ‘progressive’, and in some schools, more socialist management. In my own experience of a First/Infant school of the mid-1980s, the whole teaching staff would sit round in a circle to discuss school policy, such as reading schemes, the head teacher would act more as a chairperson than a dictator. Under neoliberalism, the Portuguese (left-wing) revolution of 1974 legally instituted collegial and democratic management of schools in Portugal, whereby school staffs elected their head teachers, ‘president of the directive council’ (Castanheira & Costa, 2011) (with candidates for head teacher, often running on party tickets). This lasted until 2008, when the Portuguese government ‘recognised’ ‘the need to develop strong leadership in the management body of a school by replacing the collegial body executive council for a single person body – a director’ (Castanheira & Costa, 2011, p. 210).

The managerialist school culture is also a far cry from a key feature of the Hargreaves Report for London’s schools (ILEA, 1984) which was to give pupils a say in the running of the school, with, for example, school councils (made up of elected representatives from the student body, plus a degree of teacher involvement) having powers not just over trivia, such as lavatories, food and litter, but also on issues such as school hours, extra-curricular activities, as well as (as previously mentioned) in relation to the curriculum and assessment, the curriculum and exams, to give pupils/students experience of democratic procedures.

Part of the ongoing de-critiquing and de-professionalization of teachers, and their reducing levels of pay, is the proletarianization of teachers—and, increasingly of the burgeoning precariat teaching in universities, has been an increased level of identification by teachers and their main unions such as the National Education Union in England and Wales, and ‘education professionals’ with the working-class movement, workers’ struggle and industrial action. That is, by increased working-class consciousness. The National Education Union (NEU), and the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) have been two trade unions in England and Wales fighting the current Conservative government(s) most successfully over various issues, such as not opening schools until safer from Covid.

(iv) Organization of Students and of the Education System Itself

A fourth question in education that critical and Marxist educators can and should ask is about organization of the students. How should children of different social classes, gender, and ethnic backgrounds be organized within classrooms, within institutions such as schools and universities, and within national education systems?

Marxists prefer and work for what in Britain is called ‘comprehensive schools’ and in India ‘the common school’. Socialists of various types argue that school should be a microcosm of society, that each school should contain a mixture of children/students from the different social classes and social class strata, and a mix of attainment levels. That is, children/students should not be divided by selection into ‘high achievers’ and ‘low achievers’, or by social class, by wealth. No moneyed or relatively well-off sections of the population should be able to buy educational advantage, and thereby disadvantage others.

Under the academic results based ‘league table’ competitive marketization of schools children/students as young as four years old are ‘ability grouped’ by able or by ‘stream’/class. This is very different from the mixed ability organization of many schools in the 1960s–1980s, and very different from the proposals of the Hargreaves Report into Secondary Education in the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA, 1984, summarized, respectively, in Doe, 1984).

(v) Ownership, Control and Management of Schools/Colleges/Universities

A fifth question Revolutionary Marxists pose is ‘who should own, control and govern schools, further education (vocational) colleges and universities?’ Should it be ‘the people’? Local councils/municipalities? Speculators, carpet salesmen and Hedge Funds? Churches and Mosques?

Revolutionary Marxist educators (and others, of course) believe that schools, colleges and universities should be run democratically, with education workers and students, as well as elected representatives of local communities, having powers in and over those education institutions, within a secular, democratic national framework. There should be no private control of schools, colleges or universities, either by private companies/shareholders, religious organizations or private individuals. Commodification and marketization in education must end (Rikowski, 2019). Thus, there should be no ‘Academies’ in England, no ‘Charter Schools’, whether ‘not-for-profit’ or ‘for profit’ in the USA. Currently, summer 2021, three quarters of all state-funded ‘Secondary’ (High) schools in England, and a third of state-funded ‘Primary’/(Elementary) schools are managed and run by private academy chains. (For attempts to address these various aspects of education, in developing a socialist policy for education, see, Edwards et al., 2018; Ford, 2016; Hill, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2019a; Hill et al., 2016).

What Is Specifically Marxist About These Policy Proposals?

What defines Marxists is firstly, the belief that reforms are not sustainable under Capitalism, they are stripped away when there are the (recurrent and systemic) crises of capital, such as the 1930s, 1970s, and currently, post 2008, and as they are likely to be post-Covid-19 (e.g., with pay cuts, union rights, social budgets under renewed threat).

The second difference is an understanding of the salience of class as compared with other forms of structural oppression and discrimination and inequality. Marxists go further than criticizing (and acting against) social discrimination, oppressions, for example, of sexism, homophobia, racism, into economic rights and into the recognition that full economic rights cannot be achieved under a capitalist economic system, but only under a socialist or communist system. Formal and informal curricula should teach Marxist analysis of society, its class-based nature—in theoretical terms, the Labour-Capital Relation. The aim is to develop class consciousness, or, as Marx put it, the working class as a ‘class for itself’, not simply a ‘class in itself’ (Marx, 1852/1999). What Gramsci called ‘good sense’, as opposed to ‘common sense’ (Gramsci, 1971/2000).

The third point of difference between Marxist and non-Marxist socialists is that in order to replace Capitalism, Marxists have to actually work to organize for that movement, for that action. Thus, a duty as a Revolutionary Marxist teacher is as an activist, and a recognition that political organization, program development, intervention are necessary. What is needed is a revolution to replace, to get rid of, the capitalist economic system.

These are three points of difference between Marxists and other socialists, between what is Marxist and what is not (Hill, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c).

The Task and Role of Marxist Educators

The role of organic Marxist public intellectuals is crucial. Marxist public intellectuals—such as the ‘political’ shop steward, or union organizer, the member of a socialist/Marxist party or group, the teacher, the teacher educator, the youth worker—intellectualize social, political, cultural, economic matters from the standpoint, to repeat, of what Gramsci (1971/2000) termed ‘good sense’, from a class—conscious perspective, or, to refer to a Classical Marxist injunction from The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels, 1848/2010), that the key political task facing communists is ‘the formation of the proletariat into a class’, that is, a ‘class for itself’, a class aware of itself as a class in the Capital–Labour relation (Marx, 1847/1999). Herein lies Marxists’ pedagogical importance, of party, organization, leaflets, newspapers, booklets, books and social media; here, as well as in the classroom in conversation and in rhetorical speeches, we carry out the role of socialist analysis, of revolutionary pedagogy, of connecting the here and now of a rent strike, a pro-immigrant rally, an anti-austerity march, a picket line of a zero-hours contract employer, an occupation of a tax avoiding multinational company owned shop: here is essential Marxist pedagogical praxis.

1. to expose and contest the ways and extent to which the capitalist class itself, through its economic power, and through its power over fiscal and economic policy of the governments that serve them, suppresses and represses both the direct wage as wage instead of capitalist profit for example as the proportion of national income, and ‘scaling back’/ underfunding/ cutting the social wage (welfare and social support systems and public health and education and social care)- and through its brute power to suppress trade unions and to dismiss workers;

2. to explain and develop consciousness, critical Marxist understanding, of the Labour-Capital Relation- that Capitalism is the exploitation of the labour power of workers through the theft of the surplus value produced by workers, stolen from them by capitalists (and by the capitalist state organisations) in the form of profit;

3. to expose and organise and teach against the actual and the symbolic violence by the capitalist state and class against the (‘raced’ and gendered) working class;

4. to expose and contest the ways and extent to which the capitalist state and its apparatuses perpetuate and reproduce their power, that of their class, through the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the state (such as the media, the schooling, further education and university systems, the electoralist parliamentary system);

5. in particular the way they do this through demeaning and deriding the ‘cultural capital’ and knowledges of the (‘raced’ and gendered) working class through what Pierre Bourdieu termed ‘cultural arbitrary’ and ‘symbolic violence’

6. argue for, propagate, organise, agitate for and implement democratic Marxist egalitarian change and policy in the wider society and economy- throughout society-not just within the classroom walls.

Conclusion

This chapter is intended as a guide to Marxist educational/pedagogical activist praxis. I have tried to set out the differences between Marxist analysis and policy for Education, distinguishing Revolutionary anti-Capitalist Marxist theory, analysis and policy from non-Marxist Critical Pedagogy, such as that of Henry Giroux, and from ‘Centrist’ as well as ‘Left’; social democracy, such as the ‘Marxian’ analysis of Michael W. Apple. Within the broader polity, this Marxist critique is also applied to left social democrats such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

The chapter poses questions which implicitly ask the reader to pause and critique their own situatedness, their own praxis, in regard to the curriculum, critical education, critical pedagogies, their public pedagogy and social and political analysis of education in general. In particular to the overall, if contested, repressive and differentiating, divisive, socially and economically reproductive role of Capitalist Education.

Using Marxist theory in general, and Marxist educational theory in particular, the chapter points the way, identifying some of the key parameters, areas of policy, in which Marxist educators can and do engage in public pedagogy and activism within education institutions.