Marxism and Education: Fragility, Crisis, Critique, Negativity, and Social Form(s)

Glenn Rikowski

Visiting Fellow, College of Social Science, University of Lincoln, UK

A paper prepared for the International Conference on Critical Education VIII, University of East London, Stratford Campus, 25 – 28 July 2018

Introduction

Twenty-one years ago, I wrote an article (Rikowski, 1997) that advocated a scorched earth policy for Marxist educational theory, and to start again from scratch after the conflagration. This paper begins such a rebuilding; only now do I feel able to begin the process, though my article Education, Capital and the Transhuman (Rikowski, 1999; reprinted as Rikowski, 2002a) can be viewed as a prefigurative effort in this respect. In that article, I tried to condense many of my ideas on Marxism, education and labour-power into a text that provided a summary of critique and analysis of capitalist education that I had worked up over the previous 15 years, but it was not exactly the kind of article I had envisaged as a starting point for my work in 1997. Education, Capital and the Transhuman was partly a reaction to the news, in 1998, that my father had cancer and I experienced a certain vulnerability and feelings of mortality that drove me to attempt to condense what I regarded as my key ideas on Marxism and education into a single article.

Thus, belatedly getting back on track, the following basic questions seemed important to me in 1997 (and indeed many years before that): Why Marxism? Why Marxism and education, or Marxist educational theory? Through addressing these questions, it is proclaimed that the significance of Marxism as a radical science is that it intellectually disrupts and ruptures capitalist society and its educational forms.

The paper rests substantially on the work of John Holloway, especially his early articles in Common Sense: Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists, and Capital & Class. On this foundation, it is argued, firstly, that the importance of Marxism resides in its capacity to pinpoint fragilities and weaknesses in the constitution, development and rule of capital in contemporary society. Understanding these fragilities and weaknesses in the constitution of capital sharpens the critical edge of any movements aimed at social transformation out of the madhouse of capital. It is indicated how Marxist educational theory plays an important role in this enterprise. These points are illustrated through consideration of the following ideas and phenomena: fragility, crisis, critique, negativity and social form(s). It is argued that fragility must be the starting point as Marxism is primarily a theory of capitalist weaknesses, and not the opposite: a theory of capitalist domination. Following Holloway, Marxism is a theory against society, rather than just another theory of society.

Paradoxically, our strength vis-à-vis capital is also the place for apprehending the fragilities and dependencies of labour. This vicious duality also exists in terms of crises in capitalism, and this flows into the phenomena of critique and negativity too. Finally, on the basis of this theorisation, the doors of capitalist hell are opened through a consideration of social forms in general and commodity forms in particular and their relations to educational processes and institutions.

Before beginning, it is necessary to say something about the status of the concept of ‘Marxist educational theory’ in this paper. As Paula Allman notes:

I contend that Marx would have scorned the idea of a Marxist educational theory because it implies that education belongs to some separate aspect of human life rather than being an integral part of the process of ‘becoming’, i.e., the lifelong process of developing all of our human potential and powers. It also implies that our current existence can be understood as the sum of the many separate and distinct parts rather than as a totality of inner-connected relations (2007, pp.51-52).

In my view, Allman is justifiably critical of the notion of “Marxist educational theory”. In relation to labour-power, for example, it is partially socially produced in education and training institutions and organisations, whilst the family also makes a contribution: e.g. help with homework, employing private tutors, but also in terms of nurturing values either supportive or antithetical to educational success in capitalist educational institutions, such as schools. Thus: ‘education’ and family’ are not empirically separate elements of capitalist society when the process of labour-power development is the focus of analysis. Furthermore, again in terms of labour-power production, the ‘economic’ and ‘education’ are not separate, as labour-power is also socially produced and enhanced in the capitalist labour process (as workers develop their capacities and powers through labour itself), and also through various work-based training programmes.

Concurring with Allman here, I would nevertheless see ‘Marxist educational theory’ as shorthand for where Marxists are engaged with understanding the significance, constitution and development of education in capitalist society in the context of capital’s transformations. Indeed, it could be argued that Marxist educational theory, if it is to be true to Marx’s conception of capitalist society and Allman’s warnings about the limitations of sociological structuralism denying this conception, then it should be inoculated against these tendencies. It should embrace an outlook that focuses on processes (e.g. labour-power production, value-creation) where structurally separating, analytically splitting up, society into structural ‘parts’ becomes a non sequitur.

What I say in this paper only makes sense insofar as the termination and transcendence of capitalist society is assumed. If you are content to exist in a social universe of capitalist domination, multiple inequalities, continuous war, imperialism, hunger and disease in many parts of the world, exploitation, dehumanisation, alienation, the suppression of alternatives to capitalism and incipient environmental catastrophe – then Marxism might not be for you. Furthermore, if you are happy to live a mode of life where the contradictions of capital become increasingly strong and hyperactive within your own psyche, your very soul, as its force develops within the human (as human capital, humans capitalised), then, good for you.

The view in this paper is that capitalism – a crisis-ridden, restless, unforgiving and desperate form of society – needs to be put in its place, into the dustbin of history, so that we can do more of what we want to do, in a more secure social and physical environment that allows the fullest expression of our abilities and passions, our creative instincts and positive feelings for others and ourselves. This is the embrace of communism.

Despite appearances, capitalism is not a strong and stable form of society, and it is ‘on this inherent instability that the whole structure of Marxist thought is grounded’ (Holloway, 1987, p.55). When presented as a theory of capitalist domination and oppression then a politics of despair and hopelessness is the end result. In contradistinction to this debilitating outlook, Marxism is actually a theory of the fragility of capitalist oppression (Holloway, 1993, p.19). Of course, there are other theories of capitalist oppression and domination, such as anti-racism, Feminism and Green theory, but Marxism roots out the weaknesses of capitalist domination – in all its forms – all the better to intensify those fragilities through theoretical attacks and developing practical and revolutionary alternatives for leaving the world of capital behind. Marxism is the most fully developed theory honed to the task of intellectually locating weaknesses in the rule of capital as part of a project for surpassing a capitalist mode of existence and nurturing the communist impulse.

Fragility

"Fragile"

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the colour of the evening sun
Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stay
Perhaps this final act was meant
To clinch a lifetime's argument
That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could
For all those born beneath an angry star
Lest we forget how fragile we are

(Lyrics to the song by Sting, 1987[1])

Harry: I can't believe it.
Lloyd: Life is a fragile thing, Har. One minute you're chewin' on a burger, the next minute you're dead meat. (From Dumb and Dumber, 1994)[2]

The lyrics from Sting’s Fragile and the dialogue from the film Dumb and Dumber paint a picture of life that is inherently risky and fragile. We must always remember how fragile our lives are, opines Sting: at any point we can become ‘dead meat’, notes Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) in Dumb and Dumber. This outlook on life seems to echo the human condition in contemporary capitalist society. At any point, capital and its human representatives (CEOs, managers, human resource departments and so on) can outsource our work, downsize the labour force at our place of employment, or fly off to the Far East and the prospects of a cheaper labour force. As unemployed folk, we appear to be at the mercy of the capitalist state (if we are lucky) and its paltry unemployment ‘benefits’, categorised as ‘shirkers’ in the right-wing press and forced to take looking for work as a pseudo full-time job, all the better to be exploited again for the social force that gets the major ‘benefits’ of our labour: capital.

These contingencies and precarities of being a worker in capitalism today vary in format, intensity and detail as between nations. Yet the key issue is our apparent social fragility: capital appears to be so powerful, unforgiving and socially justified in its operations (it’s ‘the way things are’, and ‘there is no alternative’), and is backed up by the state, police, the courts, a scolding and finger-pointing media and running dog education system, that fragility by convention appears as our social lot. We are socially fragile, and must cope and make do with that condition, it would seem. Nevertheless, we still appeal to trade unions and political parties, and sometimes victories are gained, and our fragility momentarily dissolves into warm solidarity, comradeship and the euphoria of collective progressive change. Streets, squares and other spaces of resistance may become ours, momentarily. But capital and its human representatives, its power, remain; on a global scale. Our fragility is reasserted. We cannot seem to shake it off: our precarious state of being returns, and emphasised further when we glance at what capitalist development is doing to planet Earth. Furthermore, it seems we have to go on feeding the monster, for it appears that:

If we do not devote our lives to the labour that creates capital, we face poverty, even starvation, and often physical repression (Holloway, 2010a, p.7).

Even when we articulate the fragilities of capital and resolve to attack these, intellectually and practically, this thought can at least make us cautious and often debilitate and paralyse. In attacking capital’s weak points we fear it may be creating tragic problems for ourselves.

Yet it is precisely because of these feelings and intuitions of our weakness in the face of the indefatigable and seemingly all-powerful monster that is capital, that we need Marxism. We need it to expose the weak points, the vulnerabilities and fragility of capital and this is when Marxism comes to our aid.[3] It helps us analytically locate and to practically deepen the weaknesses and fragilities of capital. In addition, Marxism of special kinds, Magical Marxism (Merrifield, 2011) and what I would call Dark Marxism[4] can come to our aid at the particular points when we worry about our own fragilities and dependencies on capital. For me, these are the principal arguments for engaging with Marxism today.

John Holloway came to similar conclusions nearly a quarter of a century ago. The fragility of capitalist oppression is central to Marxist theory, for, according to Holloway:

…while the other theories [e.g. feminism and Green theory] are theories of social domination or oppression, Marxism takes that oppression as its starting point. The question of Marxism is not: ‘how do we understand social oppression?’, but: ‘given that we live in an oppressive society, how can we understand the fragility of that oppression? (Holloway, 1994, p.39 – emphasis added).

Thus, although we experience multiple forms of oppression in capitalist society – racism, sexism and so on – understanding of the fragility of these forms of oppression, their foundations, and disrupting them, is crucial for advancing human progress. Thus: in terms of racism and sexism and other forms of oppression (with the oppression of differently abled people in Britain today being especially to the fore), the task is to locate the weak points in these forms of oppression that are simultaneously fragilities in the functioning and development of capital. Intersectionality theory in ‘radical’ social theory merely maps and laments these forms of oppression whilst simultaneously weakening wider solidarity through a kind of ‘competitive oppression’ show, thereby splitting labourers into ever more exclusive categories, and failing to get to the human sources of these oppressive phenomena in ways that constitute an intellectual, and thence practical, attack on capital.

Moving forward 21 years, and coming full circle, Holloway re-emphasises his 1994 position:

What we are really looking for is hope, for cracks [in capitalism], and trying to think about the world from the standpoint of its fragility. This means trying to understand domination as a system of domination in crisis. That is the importance of Marxism (Holloway, in Holloway and Jeffries, 2015, p.102 – emphases added).

The fragility of capitalism is based first and foremost on the fact that we, as labourers, continually create capital and its social formation; capital depends on our labour. Thus, notes Holloway (2015a), in effect we are the crisis of and for capital. ‘We’, are those who are excluded from the capitalist labour market and therefore relatively excluded from various markets for goods, and those whose labour-power is expended in a vast array of capitalist labour processes for the profit (literally) of capital, and also those engaged in the social reproduction of the magical commodity (for capital) that is labour-power (Garland, p.90). As social subjects ‘we’ are the ‘restless movement of negation’ (Holloway, 2009, p.7, in Garland, 2012, p.90).[5] The ‘social world is inherently fragile, without fixed and ultimate foundations’ (Cordero, 2017, p.1), as ‘we’ never let these solidify on the one hand as we struggle against the imperatives and domination of capital, and representatives of capital continually seek to remake the force of capital in our world through utilising our labour, intelligence and imagination, on the other. In a world of struggle, of course, we cannot ignore our own dependencies and weaknesses, but neither should we fail to seek out and exploit the fragilities of capital because of these.

It is when we move on to explore education in capitalism, capitalist education, that we find an overwhelming rationale for embracing not just Marxist science in general but Marxist educational theory in particular. This is because Marxist educational theory exposes the perniciousness and horror of the role of educational institutions in capitalist society, whilst also unfolding the most general and serious weakness of capital. Labour-power, our capacity to labour, a commodity that is bought and sold in the capitalist labour market, and which is owned by labourers and periodically used by capitalist enterprises for generating surplus value, is internal to personhoods in capitalist society. The generation of capital as more capital, its new life as surplus value, rests on the unique, magical commodity that is labour-power: the only commodity that creates more value than is represented by its continued existence in capitalist society. That this precious commodity resides within the persons of labourers in capitalist society is most inconvenient for capital and its human representatives! Labourers must be forced, cajoled, incentivised and persuaded to expend their magical commodity in capitalist labour processes to produce more value than is expressed in the wage – to produce surplus value, on which capital’s expansion and development depends.

In contemporary capitalist society and especially in the most developed capitalist countries in Europe and America since the Second World War, but today pretty much world-wide, education and training institutions have become increasingly involved in the social production of labour-power.[6] Marxism is the most advanced theory for understanding and resisting the processes involved in the social production of labour-power that we have today. It is best placed to understand and critique such siren educational policies such as ‘employability’ and apparently ‘progressive’ ideas such as ‘lifelong learning’ which can be read as lifelong labour-power production.

Furthermore, viewing the role of educational institutions in the social production of labour-power through Marxism indicates the real social power of teachers in contemporary society. They have a crucial input into the development of the unique commodity, labour-power, that the generation and expansion of capital through surplus value production is founded on. If labour-power is the fuel for the living fire (i.e. labour) then teachers can be viewed as guardians of the flame, or angels of the fuel dump – with all the power for subversion, fostering alternative visions of society, stimulating hope and the capacity for critique amongst students that human representatives of capital dread.

This singular social position of teachers generates certain dilemmas and tensions. For example, Malott and Ford (2015) discuss the fact that teachers are placed in a position where they are torn between educating for capital (preparing students for sustainable life in capitalist society) and providing students with the tools for understanding and critiquing capitalism and moving beyond it. Students and teachers have to survive in capitalist society but their grasp of the contemporary human condition should not be sacrificed to this end. Thus, Malott and Ford argue that:

Critical educators must work to produce workers useful to capital but endowed with a critical consciousness dedicated to either making capital more equal or collectively pushing their own useful labor-power against the domination of capital (2015, p.109).

Hence, we develop our labour-powers for capital (for employment purposes), whilst also carrying the threat of using those skills, capacities and abilities against capital (in anti-capitalist activity, debate and argument, within and beyond educational institutions).

There are also questions and issues surrounding when, in what contexts, and the methods to be used to teach the ideas of Karl Marx in mainstream educational settings (see Malott, Cole and Elmore, 2013), strategies useful for socialist pedagogy (see Norton and Ollman, 1978), the extent to which critical pedagogy can be truly subversive in a project of undermining the rule of capital (see McLaren, 2010), and practical projects for developing alternative, anti-capitalist and co-operative forms of teaching and learning (e.g. see Neary, 2010; Winn, 2015; Neary, 2016; and Neary and Winn, 2017). All these writings and communising measures can be viewed as making capital and its education institutions more fragile through developing critiques of and alternative practices for education that seek to move beyond capitalist educational forms.

Crisis

…we are the crisis of capital: our lack of subordination, our dignity, our humanity. We, as crisis of capital, as subjects with dignity and not as victims, we are the hope that is sought by critical thought. We are the crisis of capital and proud of it, we are proud to be the crisis of the system that is killing us (John Holloway, 2015c, p.3 – original emphasis).

We are the crisis and proud of it. Enough of saying that the capitalists are to blame for the crisis! The very notion is not only absurd but dangerous. It constitutes us as victims (John Holloway, 2010b, p.1).

Marxism is the most powerful theory of crisis we have today, and for me this is another reason for engaging with Marx and Marxist theory. Crisis in capitalism exposes fragilities in the existence and rule of capital – and this flows from an interest in uncovering the weaknesses of capital in the previous section of this paper. Crises in capitalism indicate ‘the power of labour in-against-and-beyond capital’, and ‘crisis is the manifestation of that power and for that reason the central concept of Marxism’ (Holloway, 1991, p.77). Capitalist society is crisis-ridden, and ‘crisis is always with us because, for capital, labour is a problem’ (Endnotes Collective, 2010, p.4 – original emphasis), and it is ‘the presence of the power of labour within capital that makes it ineradicably crisis-ridden’ (Holloway, 1991, p.74). Crisis is ‘the modus operandi of capital’ (Screamin’ Alice, 2008, p.1).

This connects with the previous section: the ‘constant tendency to crisis’ indicates the instability and fragility of capitalism (Holloway, 1991, p.74) and is a manifestation of the power of labour to disrupt the flow of capitalist development (Ibid.). Caffentzis argues that, for Marx ‘crisis brings to the surface the truth of the capitalist system (2002, p.6), that it has vulnerabilities and an historical shelf life. As Frings notes: ‘Every crisis points towards the historical finitude of capitalism’ (2009, p.2); and ‘in crisis the impermanence of capitalism becomes clear’ (Holloway, 1987, p.55), for crises indicate ‘the “limit experiences” of capitalism, when the mortality of the system is felt’ (Midnight Notes Collective, 2009, p.2), and on this basis it is clear that crisis is at the ‘core of capitalism’ (Holloway, 1987, p.56; and 1992, p.147).

Marxism is a theory of crisis, a theory of the fragility of capitalism; it does not have a theory of crisis (Holloway, 1994, p.39-40).[7] Thus, for those seeking not just to struggle against capitalism whilst also living within it, but to go beyond capitalism in intellectual endeavours and practical activities, then Marx’s theory, which is at its roots a theory of crisis, is invaluable.

But what constitutes a crisis? And ‘precisely what does it mean to speak of ‘crisis’?’ (Samman, 2001, p.4). Etymologically the concept of ‘crisis’ comes from the Greek noun krisis – denoting some decision, choice or judgement being made (Peters, 2013, p.199),[8] and the Greek verb krino, ‘meaning to cut, to select, to decide to judge – a root it shares with the term ‘criticism’’ (Osborne, 2010, p.23). This outlook on crisis is often traced back to Hippocrates (1983), as doctors are charged with the responsibility of making correct decisions and choices regarding the health and well-being of patients. In turn, they are also responsible for correct diagnoses of diseases and ailments, and effective monitoring of the patient following medical intervention. The ‘crisis’ point in disease, for Hippocrates, is a turning point in the strength of a disease: when it becomes clear that the patient is either on the road to recovery, or faces death or at least severe debilitation (e.g. amputation of limbs). As Bill Dunn (2014) notes, invoking ‘crisis’ as starting point for social explanation means that recovery needs to be accounted for when this occurs.

John Holloway (1992), following Hippocrates, argues that ‘crisis’ designates:

A qualitative turning point, a break in the normal process of change, is a crisis. The original term ‘crisis’ is medical. In its original Greek meaning it referred to a turning point in an illness (p.145 – emphasis added).

The crisis point is that moment when death or recovery hangs in the balance. Holloway argues that this approach to crisis, crisis as a turning point, can also be applied to social scientific and historical studies, and that:

… crisis does not simply refer to ‘hard times’, but to turning points. It directs attention to the discontinuities of history, to breaks in the path of development, ruptures in a pattern of movement, variations in the intensity of time. The concept of crisis implies that history is not smooth or predictable, but full of shifts in direction and periods of intensified change (1992, p.146 – emphasis added).

For Holloway (1992) the concept of crisis is an indispensable aid to understanding social and historical change. Holloway’s point that crisis ‘implies that history is not smooth or predictable’ should also incorporate the notion that crises can recur: a singular crisis can appear to have reached a positive turning point only to move into a negative direction later on.[9] Thus, although ‘…crisis is a period of intensified change which may lead one way or the other’ (Holloway, 1992, p.146 – emphasis added), there could be retrogression, a back-tracking and reoccurrence of the crisis.

Thus, from its medical roots[10] the notion of crisis can be applied to social phenomena, processes and developments. To say that these are in a state of crisis is to designate a situation as involving ‘imminent danger and high risk’ (Gamble, 2009, p.39). This makes quick decisions necessary, often ‘under pressure with very incomplete knowledge’ which ‘can lead to very different results’ (Ibid.).[11]

In her book, Anti-Crisis (2014), and in an earlier article (2011), Janet Roitman argues that ‘crisis’:

…is a primary enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge. Making that blind spot visible means asking questions about how we produce significance for ourselves (2011, p.3).

Crisis is a ‘blind spot’ because we cannot view or grasp it independently of the phenomena that appear to constitute a ’crisis’. Thinking about and through the concept of crisis becomes an enabling tool for the production of certain kinds of knowledge, especially historical knowledge, although in her 2014 book, Roitman illustrates its efficacy for social scientific analysis in general – and especially for economics.

Roitman’s analysis of crisis suggests that the idea of crisis refers to a phenomenon without a subject: crisis is merely an effect of a complex set of social conjunctures and trends, but has no subject of its own. The centripetal point of this social whirlpool is empty, a void. The eye of the social storm cannot be seen: de facto it is therefore without content. The Cambridge English Dictionary (CED) has two interesting definitions of ‘blind spot’ for our purposes. The first is that a blind spot is: ‘an area that you are not able to see, especially the part a road you cannot see when you are driving, behind and slightly to one side of the car’.[12] In this case, the viewer is unable to see part of the road, though arranging wing mirrors correctly would throw light on the blind spot – a point that was relevant when my car was hit by a French coach on the M1 motorway in July 1994! However it is the second CED definition that hits home, where a blind spot is: ‘a subject that you find very difficult to understand at all, sometimes because you are not willing to try’ (Ibid. footnote 10, emphasis added). On the basis of this second definition, it could be argued that Roitman has simply not enquired what the social eye of the storm might be: she has not explored what the subject of crisis is, or could be, in good faith. ‘What exactly is in crisis?’ (Roitman, 2014, p.49 – original emphasis), she queries. Answering this question is pointless, notes Roitman:

The hasty assumption that some thing is in crisis induces an inevitable leap to abstraction because, as I indicated …[previously] … crisis, in itself cannot be located or observed as an object of first-order knowledge. One can make the statement “I lost a million dollars” as a first-order observation; but the declaration “This is a crisis” is necessarily a second-order observation (Ibid.).

Roitman, whilst ruling out that there could be an object of a particular crisis, does consider briefly whether there could be subjects of crises (Roitman, 2014, pp.65-70) that can be grasped. Thus, crisis situations can bring about certain experiences that do provide a central social content for crises. For example, Roitman notes that the economic crisis of 2007-09 occasioned a ‘crisis of the neoliberal subject’, as this crisis was impossible on the basis of neoliberal perspectives on economy and society – yet it happened – thereby generating a crisis of neoliberal subjectivity, which people shared to varying degrees, with mainstream economists especially feeling the clash of their world view with the social reality of bank failures, credit crunches, mortgage defaults, evictions and the other phenomena constituting the 2007-09 scenario. But Roitman’s view is that this re-centring misreads (and also the unfortunate people embroiled in the 2007-09 crisis misread) what happened, for:

… crisis is the unexamined point of departure for narration. It is a blind spot for the production of knowledge about what constitutes historical significance and about what constitutes social or historical meaning … [Therefore] … posited in this way, crisis is the point from which hermeneutics or anthropology begins: crisis is the means to access both “the social” and “experience” because it entails the disclosure of the constitutive conditions of human practice (2014, p.66).

Thus, crisis is a ‘narrative category’ (Roitman, 2014, p.70): the point at which a story, a narrative, begins regarding situations we take to be those of ‘crisis’. The idea of crisis allows us to construct meanings and narratives about historical turning points and in these processes we are the ‘subjects of times of crisis’ (Roitman, 2014, p.66); the storytellers, the meaning-makers, are the real subjects of these crises for Roitman.

Fortunately, Roitman’s precepts and prolixity come after many others had previously advanced perceptible points to, and subjects of, crises. Turning to the notion of ‘education crisis’ briefly, the subjects of crisis have been, for example: state-financed public education (e.g. Sarup, 1982); education for its own sake (e.g. Furedi, 2009; Hodgson, Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2017); the learning society and lifelong learning (Wain, 2004), or the school system (Arendt, 1961).[13] Thus, others have not succumbed to the second CED definition of ‘blind spot’ and have refused to avoid or evade putting forward a subject of education crisis.

In line with the project of locating the weaknesses and fragilities of capital’s domination of our lives, as argued for previously, then the subject of crisis should be the most explosive, yet basic and corrosive subject of crisis imaginable: the capital relation, the social relation between labour and capital, sometimes referred to as the class relation. This subject of crisis obliterates any ‘blind spot’, and can be observed throughout the capitalist social formation – not just in what is viewed as the ‘economy’, and especially not just at the point of production, in the capitalist labour process. Crises in the capital relation are central to capitalist development, as:

The history if capitalist society is the history of the reproduction of the capitalist class relation … [And ] … if we assume the reproduction of this relation is not inevitable, what is the possibility of its non-reproduction? For a brief moment the recent [2007-09] crisis perhaps seemed to present us with a glimpse of such non-reproduction (Endnotes Collective, 2010, p.3 – original emphasis).

As Holloway (1987) notes:

Capitalist crisis is a crisis of the capital relation. It is not a “recession” or a “downturn in the economy” although it may appear as such; it is a crisis of the relation between the ruling class and the exploited class (p.56 – emphasis added).

For Holloway, this is the ‘fundamental point’ that discussions of crisis typically avoid. Crises of capitalist domination are periodically thrown up as, adds Holloway, ‘domination is never easy’ and the dominated ‘are alive and resist’ (Ibid.). Thus:

… any ruling class must constantly struggle to impose its own will, to harness life for its own deadly purposes. Crisis is central to Marxist theory because it expresses the failure of dead labour to harness the forces of life (Holloway, 1987, p. 56).

Crisis ‘expresses the structural instability of capitalist social relations, the instability of the basic relation between capital and labour on which the society is based’ (Holloway, 1992, p. 159); it is a ‘crisis of the capital relation’ which is ‘made inevitable by the inherent contradictions of that relation’ (Holloway, and Picciotto, 1977, p. 92). This is what crisis is; the capital relation is the subject of crisis. A theory of crisis is therefore a ‘theory of the volatility of class relations’ (Holloway, 1992, p.162). But while it is a theory of the breakdown of a pattern of accumulation (e.g. the period of neoliberal capitalist rule from the end of the Post-War boom) it is also about the ‘reestablishment of class relations’ founded on their restructuring across the social formation (with national and regional variations in strategies pursued). Thus, in a time of crisis, representatives of the capitalist class seek to restructure the capital relation in all of the institutions of society – including education – in favour of capitalist development and attempts at stabilising capitalist rule. For Holloway, crisis is the result:

…not of the strength of the working class or of the labour movement, necessarily, but of the strength of the general resistance to capital’s drive for an ever more profound subordination of humanity … (2002a, p.39 – emphasis added).

Nevertheless, overt class struggle (strikes, protests, sit-ins, workers taking over factories, sabotage etc.) is an indicator of a clear failure of representatives of capital to adequately subsume the wills of labourers, collective labour, under the yoke of the imperatives of capital. If a crisis in the capital relation explodes onto the streets and into factories and offices then this is a vital message to human representatives of capital, but they are also alarmed by everyday forms of resistance; for example, relative idleness, coasting, time-wasting (e.g. messing about on Facebook) and low-level forms of resistance that nevertheless when aggregated indicate capital’s failure to adequately control the labour of workers.[14] At particular times, the relation of domination ‘comes under strain’ and if this pressure becomes intense, shows itself as crisis, heralding dangers for capitalist vitality, and then the capital relation has to ‘be restructured if capital is to remain in command’ (Holloway, 1987, p.56).

Critique

If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order,[15] ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries nor from conflict with the powers that be (Karl Marx, 1843, p.207 – original emphasis).

Critique is a splitting of the atom, the opening of categories that are closed, to reveal the antagonism within them (John Holloway, 2012, p.515).

The idea of critique has taken a number of poundings in recent years. Bruno Latour flags up that critique has ‘run out of steam’ (2004) on the one hand, and on the other Richard Kilminster (2013) points to critique’s overbearing strength and argues that, like a kind of intellectual Japanese knotweed, critique has choked off signs of human progress and the notion that there are things worth preserving and valuing in contemporary society. In short, Kilminster, coming at critique as a sociologist, points to ‘unalloyed overcritique’ in contemporary social science where the contrast between society as it is (capitalism) and as it ought to be (communism) has become too great (2013, p.5). This leads to an imbalance in making judgements about contemporary society, downplaying its ‘achievements and benign compulsion’ (p.7).

Other sociologists have noted the ‘excessiveness’ of critique. For example, Bülent Diken (2015) splits critique into radical critique and the sociology of critique grounded in a ‘pragmatic sociology’ (p.923). Diken focuses largely on the latter, where critique ‘is that which enables us to contemplate our present condition in the prism of the possible’ (Ibid.), thereby placing limits on critique and corralling off the radical alternative. The sociology of critique focuses ‘on the transformations of capitalism’ (p.924), as opposed to seeking out its fragilities with a view to exacerbating them. Thus: the sociology of critique ‘reduces all critique to reformist critique’ (Diken, 2015, p.930; and Diken, 2012, p.159). When he comes to consider radical critique (only briefly, pp.930-932), Diken spends most of his keyboarding on how, in contemporary society, critiques of capitalism are absorbed into the social formation and spat out as new forms of accommodating people to the rule of capital. Furthermore, for Dicken, radical critique is ‘utopian’ (Dicken, 20012, p.172), which leads him to browse through various forms of utopia, and all this is set within a chapter called ‘Critique of critique of critique …’ (2012, pp.153-165).

Much of what Diken has to say appears to be influenced by the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2007) where critique seems futile, pointless, as capital’s capacity to absorb and incorporate critique, protest and resistance appears to be boundless. Social critique ‘has not seemed so helpless for a century as it has been for the last fifteen years’ according to Boltanski and Chiapello (2007, p.xxxv). For, as Boltanski and Chiapello see it:

Capitalism keeps going, and typically overcomes the crises it generates, by responding to “critique”, stealing the thunder of its critics by answering some of their challenges while diverting attention from other grievances that are either left unremedied or exacerbated (Brick, 2009, p.2).

Taking a neo-Weberian tack, Boltanski and Chaipello argue that as the ‘spirit’ of capitalism constantly evolves and mutates then radical Left critics of capitalism need to keep innovating in their critical analyses. Thus, critique becomes a labour of Sisyphus, a treadmill process, forever trying to catch up with the cunning metamorphoses of capital, with traditions of anti-capitalism being constantly outmoded (Brick, 2009, p.6). Unsurprisingly, Boltanski’s (2011) later analysis of critique indicates that he is approaching it through ‘the concept of social domination’ (p.1); that is, starting out from capital’s domination over labour and labourers, whereas the opposite perspective, of exploring capital’s weaknesses and fragilities through critique, is what I argued for earlier in this paper.[16]

Where critique is not futile, or useless for significantly impacting on and moving beyond the rule of capital, some argue that it is most certainly limited. Thus, the analyst should focus on the limits of critique (Felski, 2015)[17], its effects on the subject or object of critique being too corrosive. For Felski, this is because critique is aggressive, stroppy, and the process of critique and the person undertaking it ‘likes to have the last word’ (2015, p.123). Critique is unpleasant! This is so even though, argues Felski, it is secondary to what is being critiqued: the centre of critique, what is being critiqued, is smothered by analysis. Because critique is negative (pp.127-134) it necessarily underplays any worth, merits, beauty and enchantment possessed by the phenomena being critiqued. The very intellectuality of critique tends to cut out, demote or undermine any emotional or moral responses to the subject or object of critique, hence narrowing the range of human expression (Felski, 2015, pp.134-140). Furthermore, as critique ‘comes from below’ (e.g. Marxism, critical theory) its historical failure to lead to emancipation causes despair. Additionally, as critique purports to speak for the oppressed, disadvantaged and downtrodden, once it is taken up by academics and Left intellectuals, as it invariably is, its academisation triggers ‘feelings of resentment’ and complaints of ‘being inaccessible’ (e.g. postmodernism in its most ‘clever’ expressions), or ‘irrelevant to larger communities of the oppressed’ (Felski, 2015, p.142). From such a perspective on critique it is a short step to flying the flag of ‘postcritique’, which Felski unfurls with her collaborator Elizabeth Anker (in Anker and Felski, 2017).

The ‘critique of critique’ has found its way into educational theory and philosophy in recent years. Barbara Applebaum’s (2011) influential article consolidated a postcritique trend in the philosophy of education that had been hardening for some years. She follows Judith Butler’s idea of ‘suspending judgement’ (though not abolishing it altogether) in the process of critique (see Butler, 2001).[18] For Applebaum, the main problem is to introduce judgement regarding a state of affairs once it has been suspended (2011, p.62). Rather than addressing this point, Applebaum makes a plea for Butlerian critique (with its suspension, and allied to poststructuralism) to be central to educating students about discourses that obscure issues regarding how they gain their knowledge and ‘who benefits from such practices’ (Ibid.).

More recently, there has been a related shift towards post-critical philosophy of education and post-critical pedagogy, with the work of Naomi Hodgson, Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski fanning the flames of post-critique in educational theory and practice (in Hodgson, Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2016, 2017a and b, and 2018). These post-critical educational theorists insist that the post-criticality of their Manifesto ‘is by no means an anti-critical position’ (2017b, p.17), but I remain unconvinced.[19] As Christian Garland has noted, there are ‘multiple standpoints for critique’, however:

…‘post-critique’ is not one of them, seeking as it does to post-date the concept without contributing to its development, accepting existing society as ‘natural, inevitable and immutable’ (2017, p.1).

And at this point the ‘critique of critique of critique of the post-post critical’ (for education and everything else) is left behind, with a critique of this debilitating theoretical melange best reserved for future writings.

To get back to one of the original questions: why Marxism? I would argue that a commitment to Marxism is justified in virtue of the specific form of critique that Marxism offers. Before explicating Marxism’s powerful critique, a few preliminary points. First, as Roitman (2014) has argued, crisis and critique are ‘cognates’: etymologically these two concepts have a common origin, they are like conceptual ‘blood relatives’ (see Boland, 2013, p.231 on this point). As Fornäs (2013) has pointed out, the idea of critique derives ultimately from the Greek kritikos which is concerned with making judgements, deciding right from wrong, what is the case is separated from what is not (p.505). This has some overlap with the Greek origins of the concept of crisis, as illustrated earlier. Gürses notes that ‘as an adjective (kritokos) and a verb (krenein)’ these Greek roots indicate acts of ‘distinguishing, separating, deciding, judging, incriminating – and contending’ (2006, p.1 – original emphasis). Gürses goes on to show how critique also has origins in medical terminology,[20] as for the concept of crisis, which was indicated previously in this paper.

Fornäs notes that from the 16^th and 17^th centuries the notion of critique came to denote ‘a more general fault-finding, a negative objection to something’ (pp.504-505 – original emphasis), which still has contemporary resonance. The concept of critique was then also used in relation to literary and artistic productions – which continued to the present day (Fornäs, 2013, p.505). It was Immanuel Kant that ‘generalised this aesthetic concept of critique’ which came to ‘signify any detailed analytical judgement based on ability of distinction, differentiation and discrimination’ (Ibid. – emphasis added). In the 19^th Century, Marx in particular took up the sword of critique to political economy and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory waved it in the direction of cultural analysis in the 20^th century. The idea of critique grew in strength in all the social sciences, arts and humanities from the late 19^th century.

Having explored some aspects of the contemporary challenges to, and origins of, the idea of critique then a return to generating the specific form of critique I referred to earlier in this section can now begin. Marxism, for me, does not just have a theory of critique, but is a theory of critique: it lives and breathes critique; it is a deeply radical critique as it gets to us, to labour and labourers (the radical roots). It demonstrates how our labour is at the base of the concepts and ideas that express capital’s domination, the real abstractions and the processes they represent and express which we seek to undermine and make weaker, more fragile. As Foucault notes ‘critique is a matter of making things more fragile’ (2007, p.138), and Marxism is the most powerful theory we have for this enterprise. As John Holloway argues:

…the focus on the fragility of capitalism points in the direction of exploiting that fragility now, opening up cracks in the texture of domination wherever we can (2005, p.273).

There are three main ways of doing this. First, there can be spaces opened up within the belly of the beast, within capital’s social universe: alternatives, practical initiatives that seek to clash against the rule of capital and its abstractions, especially against abstract labour. These practical activities and initiatives seek not to just resist capitalist social life (that is, being against capital) but also to constitute themselves as attempts to go beyond it. Secondly, the communist impulse can be nurtured within existing capitalist society. That is, how we relate to each other differently, forging stronger social relations based on an already existing communism-within-capitalism;[21] strengthening the social relations of the future by making them stronger today. Thirdly, critique within Marxism is an intellectual attack on capitalism; opening up conceptual fragilities, metaphorically jumping on the weak points of capital, and shouting about these from the rooftops! This third point concerns us here.

Yes, but the commodity, value, and abstract labour: how do we exorcise these from our social lives? How do we cut these monsters down to size and them consign their shattered bodies to the waste disposal unit? Marxist critique provides the necessary intellectual machinery. Marxism is a theoretical Large Hadron Collider that splits apart the hard, resistant ideas giving form to capital’s social universe. In turning on the power for the atomic accelerator we engineer the fragmentation of capital’s concepts which appear as ‘crystallizations of the way in which social relations are historically organized’ (Cordero, 2017, p.8). As Neary makes clear:

It is only by fixing these categories, or real abstractions, in their actual social substance that they can be disabled of their social power and stripped of their authority (2017, p.561).

We shatter the crystalline ideas that hold capital together, to reveal ourselves once the dust has settled; ourselves as the real doers, the organisers and creators of a massive social force that oppresses us. The ‘critical interrogation of the social substance of capitalist categories’ (Moraitis and Copley, 2017, p.99, referring to Marx, 1867a, p.174) is the object of Marxist critique.

Rita Felski notes, disapprovingly: ‘Crrritique! The word flies off the tongue like a weapon, emitting a rapid guttural burst of machine-gun-fire’ (2015, p.120); but Marxism goes nuclear with critique, and does not mess with machine-guns or pea shooters. We have a social universe to intellectually conquer, and another to build – simultaneously! We need a dissolution weapon with the power of Marxist critique! Marxism as the ultimate intellectual weapon splits open capital’s frozen stiff categories to show the power of human action in all its magical wildness, for:

Take a category, split it open. What do we see? Perhaps more categories. Take the commodity, for example, as Marx did. Split is open and we discover the antagonistic unity of value and use value (Holloway 2012, p.515) … [And] ... Take a category, split it open and what we discover is not a philosophical contradiction but a living antagonism, a constant struggle, a clash of opposing movings (p.517).

While this particular splitting process yields the tension, the violent relation between value (grounded in abstract labour) and use value (expressed in commodities), the critique is not radical, does not get to the root of the matter. As Holloway argues:

But that is not enough. We need to go to the core, we need to go ad hominem (as Marx insists). We need to reach an understanding of the category in terms of human action, going through layer after layer of conceptualization if necessary. Why? Because it is only if we understand the social world in terms of human action that we can pose clearly the questions of what human action is necessary to change it (2012, p.515 – emphasis added).

Thus, critique drives on until the human content of the categories we are shattering is uncovered; it is crucial to show how we (as labour and labourers) create and generate capital’s social forms that come to stand against us as ghostly but real abstractions that rule our lives. Critique, then, in this sense, is not just an academic exercise interrogating discourse, for exposing inconsistencies, contradictions, aporias, or maleficent values lurking under expressions of seemingly positive virtues.[22] It aims to uncover what humans do in capitalist society, what exists underneath the concepts and abstractions that give capital its substance and coherence – in order to do different, to communise. The starting point for this is to critique ‘unreflected presuppositions’ incorporated in concepts with social validity in capitalist society, such as ‘commodity’, ‘value’ and ‘labour’, in order to uncover how these constituted form ‘are forms of human social practice’ (Bonefeld, 2005, p.1), in order to show how we create, nurture and maintain these social forms, how we keep on making capitalism, as a guide to how we might generate alternative social relations and different ways of doing. Thus, Marxist critique is a theory of social constitution, how capitalist forms are generated and maintained; how capitalism is socially constituted – with ‘us’ at the terminus of capitalism and its unravelling. Marx’s critique, and Marxist critique, ‘has to show the human content, however perverted and debased, of the constitutional forms of capital … for there is no form without content’ (Bonefeld, 2005, p.2).

The ‘critique of forms’ (Holloway, 2001, p.66) uncovers the antagonistic social relations constituting them but we also see ourselves as the ‘negated subject’ (Ibid.), for:

Capital depends on the doing which it denies: therein lies the force of hope which exists in the mode of being denied, therein lies hope (2001, p.68).

Our mode of existence might be denied in capital’s social universe, but we are always there; capital cannot shake us off, and more to the point is dependent on our labour for its existence. Marx’s Capital is:

…a critique of the categories of political economy, but the same principles apply to a critique of religion, or politics, or sociology, or gender studies, or whatever: the question is always how do we understand the existence of the categories ad hominem, on the basis of the way in which human activity is organized (Holloway, 2012, p.516).

Of course, education could be added to Holloway’s list of categories. However, there are a number of considerations here – that will be taken up in future work in more depth.

First, it is not clear what the starting point should be for a critique of capitalist education. For many years now, I have been interested in the question of what makes capitalist education capitalist education: what is the form that education takes in capitalist society? It seems to me that education in capitalist society is currently in the process of being capitalised; that is, becoming capital. Marx notes in the Grundrisse (1858) that, regarding capital, it is necessary to explore the ‘conditions and presuppositions of the becoming, of the arising’ of capital, and this presupposes ‘precisely that it is not yet in being, but merely in becoming (p.459 – original emphases). This is all the more so for education as in many of the most developed capitalist countries the state plays a significant role in education today; education has not been fully subsumed under the orbit of capital. Holloway argues that in the critique of capitalism:

We take the commodity for the sake of familiarity, but we could have started anywhere (2012, p.516).

Thus: we could have started with education in capitalism on this basis. Yet later on in the same article Holloway argues that: ‘In the centre of critique is the opening of the most important atom of all: labour’[23] (2012, p.517 – emphasis added), and more recently Holloway has argued that ‘wealth’ (abundance, or richness) is the real starting point for analysis in Marx’s Capital, on the basis of the opening sentence (as opposed to the commodity) (see Holloway, 2015 and 2017b).[24]

Eighteen years ago, I argued that the starting point for an understanding and critique of capitalist education was labour-power as a commodity (Rikowski, 2000). When Marx ‘split the commodity’ in Capital he got to value, exchange-value (as the form of appearance of value) and use-value, and further splits led to labour and thence to concrete and abstract labour. It seemed to me that uncovering labour-power as a commodity, or ‘splitting’ it in Holloway’s terms would get me to the human content in its social production the social production of labour-power, where capitalist education plays a part (perhaps the main part) in the social production of labour-power, and the labour involved in the social production of labour-power would, therefore, form the human practices involved in this form of production. But further studies of commodity forms suggested I was at most half right: I had not considered capitalist education as a milieu for the formation of the general class of commodities (see Rikowski, 2000, pp.27-31) within educational institutions in contemporary capitalism (of which more in the final section of this paper). Work from 2001-2006 indicted to me that there were two starting points for the critique of capitalist education; two commodity forms that opened up the concepts necessary for such a critique: labour-power (the unique value-creating commodity), and the general class of commodities.[25] In the case of private for-profit schools and universities, these two commodity forms and their development work in tandem.

Negativity

We are NO, we are negativity, we are the crisis of capital. But we are more than that. We are the crisis of that which produces capital, the crisis of abstract, alienated labour (John Holloway, 2006, p.1).

Thought, to be true to the scream, must be negative. We do not want to understand the world, but to negate it. The aim of theorising is to conceptualise the world negatively, not as something separate from practice, but as a moment of practice, as part of the struggle to change the world, to make it fit for humans to live in (John Holloway, 2010b, p.1).

Another reason, for me, for adopting Marxism and Marxist educational theory, is that Marxism is a negative theory par excellence; it dissolves the whole of capitalist society into a ferocious sea of negativity. For me, as for Holloway, the appeal of Marxism ‘lies in its claim to be a theory of struggle, of opposition, of negation’ (19991, p.69 – emphasis added). The importance of this is that no institution, process, or social phenomena within capitalist society is capable of redemption in its own right or making up for any of the multiple ills of this social formation. More importantly, negativity is allied to the critique of capitalist social phenomena, institutions etc.; as our mode of being, our mode of existence is continually denied, critique ad hominem can regain our dignity through uncovering how our social doing, our labour, intellectual and scientific endeavours, and application generate the real abstractions that hem us in, impoverish our lives, and undercut and dissolve ‘the social relation out of which real abstractions are derived’ (Neary, 2017, p.559). Radical, revolutionary theory (Marxism) is necessarily a negative encounter with capitalist society. There is no middle or ‘third’ way between the bourgeois social sciences and Marxist theory.

As Holloway notes: we begin with ‘the scream, No, negativity’ (2005, p.265), and the scream of refusal echoes throughout our critiques of capitalism. If we forget the power of ‘No’ for an instant then ideas, conceptions, theories positive towards capitalism and its future can seep into our critical projects, and then they are contaminated, undermined, with our critical power draining away to pointlessness. Of course, it is not easy, living as we do, surrounded by and immersed in all the paraphernalia of capitalist society, with its seemingly powerful propaganda machines (TV, press, and other mass media), and with the monumental architecture of bourgeois social theory crowding academic journals and publishing houses; but our ‘No’ must be kept in view, ingrained into our critiques of capital, for:

It is revulsion against injustice, exploitation, violence, war. It [No] comes before reflection, before reasoned thought – it is pre-rational, but not irrational or anti-rational (Holloway, 2005, pp.265-266).

For Holloway, ‘No’ is: uncouth, urgent, engenders unity, is the key to our power, intellectually breaks and ruptures, is asymmetrical (as there is a resounding ‘No’ to ‘the form of social relation implied by capital, ‘No’ to capitalist forms of organisation’), points to the generation of the world by our doing, it opens ups ‘a new conceptual world’, it moves (through ‘pushing against and beyond’), is a question (not an answer), and is immediate – ‘No to capitalism means revolution now’ (2005, pp.265-269). Most importantly, for Holloway (2005), a massive and repeated ‘No’ to capitalism opens up the prospects for many ‘Yesses’: radical, practical experiments that are not just anti-capitalist but attempts to push beyond capitalist social relations. ‘No’ spawns the critique of capitalism; Yesses are figurative (not prefigurative) forms of organisation established within capitalism as we know. Thus: one No, and many Yesses. For Benjamin Noys:

…the rehabilitation of negativity is crucial to negotiating the inhospitable climate for radical theory. A first step is the negation of capitalism as the untranscendable horizon of our time (2012, p.174).

We cannot transcend capitalism, perceive and change it from above, from the outside. There is no outside. Hence, it must be imploded from within; intellectually through critique, and practically by forging forms of organisation that incorporate new, anti-capitalist and communising social relations.

The problem with all this, for educational theory and practice (including, especially, for Marxist educational theory), is that education in contemporary capitalism often carries with it a strong sense, a history, even a feeling of affirmation. Negativity spoils the trip. When I went into teacher training I was enthused by the idea of teaching young people the ‘wonders of knowledge’ in a naïve idealist kind of way. Those starting out in education, as school teachers for example, might be imbued with the strong elixir of educational enchantment. In education policy, in England, for example, in recent years, we have witnessed apparently marvellous statements and policies on The Learning Society and Lifelong Learning, and the wonders of education policies attached to the Knowledge Economy. The virtues of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects have been extolled. Then there are peons to ‘employability’, and who could be against that? Helping young people navigate complex contemporary labour markets. Education is one of the most affirmative academic disciplines and forms of academic practice in contemporary capitalism. In the most developed capitalist countries this is bolstered by the phenomenon of state education: state-financed, state-run schools, colleges and universities. Thus, there is often a commitment amongst teachers and allied educational staffs to public education, state education, and this throws into relief the work of the capitalist state and its education policies and imperatives. This makes a commitment to the critique of capitalist education, with a negative outlook on capitalist educational forms, institutions and practices, problematic for some. Education crisis is very often seen as a crisis of public, state-centred education (e.g. Sarup, 1982). How can we be critical, to the extent of calling for the dissolution of capitalist education, whilst recognising the views of teachers and students who have a commitment to working within the currently constituted capitalist education system? But for me, the commitment of teachers and students to capitalist educational forms is precisely what a critique of academic labour should include in its prospectus. Just as workers in an engineering factory might have an emotional attachment, pride even, in the work they do (as I discovered in a study of engineering apprenticeships I undertook from 1980-82) there are teachers with similar views.

Another fact that muddies the water is that capital has not subsumed to any great extent, not yet substantially capitalised, educational institutions, processes and phenomena. For-profit schools and colleges are in a minority in terms of the proportions of young people going to them in many countries. This can lead to ideas about radicalising practices in public, state-financed schools, such as progressive education in England’s primary schools in the 1960s, or bringing in Critical Pedagogy to classrooms (as in some schools in the United States), or attempts to enhance ‘democratic schooling’. All these developments can be seen and experienced as redemptive for capitalist education; that is, it can appear to have some worthwhile features and characteristics that justify saving it through the engine of reform and recalibration. Apparently, positive things can be done with and in capitalist education! This moves us away from the negative; weakening our critique, letting capital (and its educational forms) off the hook, sewing illusions, becoming deluded, for:

In education, for example, many of us already take as a starting point the view that the only education that makes sense is one that points towards a future for humanity, and therefore aims at the destruction of capitalism. Sometimes we feel afraid to state what is probably obvious to most people, but often it is important to state the obvious. The best defence is usually attack: attack the schools, attack the universities, attack the hospitals (Holloway, 2012b, p.4).

Holloway might be indulging in wishful thinking regarding ‘many of us’ holding that education should aim at the destruction of capitalism, and maybe even most teachers in state schools do not think this, but he would be correct in thinking that even if a minority of people (or teachers and students) hold to this view then that is not an excuse to give up on negativity as far as education is concerned. In addition, radical alternatives to capitalist education must be developed as capital’s state educational institutions are dismantled.

Once we embark on one of the tracks that sets out to redeem, to find hope, in capitalist education then any critique we might have of it becomes stunted and loses its force and dynamic. A pedagogy of hate is required to generate the motivating power for the kind of critique of capitalist education that does not swerve off into affirming some aspect or aspects of it. This is not ‘a personal, psychological or pathological hate’, rather it is a ‘radical structural hate for what the world has become’ (Neary, 2017, p.560) in general, and what capitalist education has become in particular. For Neary: ‘Radical hate is the critical concept on which absolute negativity is based’ (Ibid. – emphasis added). This is a ‘hate for capitalist civilisation’ and is ‘fundamental to the structure and meaning of absolute negativity’ (Neary, 2017, p.561). We stoke and reserve hate for the world of capital, capital’s social universe (as Postone 1996 has it) that we have created and acts as a force that oppresses us throughout the capitalist social formation, that constrains and limits what we can do and become.

Radical love, on the other hand (which must exist if radical hate is to have any meaning), has at least two specific forms in capitalist society. Radical love is one aspect of the communist impulse; the impulse for co-operation, solidarity, helpfulness, kindness and other forms of behaviour where we help each other get through life in capitalist society. It is this kind of love for others that helps capitalism to survive! If we were all competitive arseholes in an Ayn Randian kind of way, taking Hobbes’s ‘war of all against all’ to heart in the context of capitalist society, then, if capitalism did actually survive this, capitalist social life would be unbearable at the least! Capitalism depends on the communism suppressed and unrecognised within it. A second form of radical love within capitalist is love for our own attempts to move against, but especially beyond, the rule of capital in our lives. For education, we can have unconditional love for alternative, co-operative and experimental forms of education that seek to break the chains of capitalist education. There is room for love in education! Furthermore, as noted previously, as capital has only partially succeeded in capitalising educational institutions then there is still some space for the love of ‘education for its own sake’, or education as a ‘public good’, for example. Thus, we can still have radical love for education as a public good, in England today: it still makes sense precisely because capital has so far failed to incorporate education to a significant extent within its orbit. However, such an attachment to these transcendental or idealist forms of educational expression is conditional on the extent to which capital makes inroads into educational institutions. Love of education as a public good – the wonderful things education can do for the community – is tenuous and insecure if insufficient theoretical and practical force is paid to combatting incursions by capital (e.g. typically through capitalist state education policies that aimed at facilitating the business takeover of education). Teachers and educational theorists who hold such views are holding capital at bay, making life difficult for capital, but may be unaware of the nature of the enemy they face and the need to engage in the critique of capitalist education and to create alternative forms of education, to insulate education against capital – which is why the critique of capitalist education has more significance than any political, moral or aesthetic commitment to education in capitalism.

Social Form(s)

For me, a focus on pinpointing the fragilities of capital and its social formation – all the better to attack those points, intellectually and practically – brings out in marvellous bas-relief, enhanced by crisis and critique, the power of labour, a power that can abolish itself (along with the value-form, abstract labour, social class, exploitation and all the other accoutrements of capital). Channelling this power, we can grasp possibilities for breaking the labour-capital relation, and:

Once the relation between capital and labour is seen as an internal relation, then the question of form becomes crucial (Holloway, 1991, p.73 – emphases added).

The question of form, for Marx, is ‘the crucial dividing line between his [Marx’s] theory and bourgeois theory, for which the question of form is meaningless’, argues Holloway (Ibid). Right at the beginning of Capital, Marx brings in the notion of form:

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears an ‘immense collection of commodities; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with analysis of the commodity (Marx, 1867a, p.125).

Thus, the wealth (or richness) within capitalism appears as an immense collection of commodities; that is, takes the form of an immense collection of commodities. A single commodity appears as the elementary form of wealth in capitalist society. This is because, in bourgeois society, notes Marx:

…the commodity-form of the product of labour – or the value-form of the commodity – is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy (1867b, p.19 – emphasis added).

As Werner Bonefeld notes: ‘Marx’s work focuses on forms’ (2014, p.2); on forms of consciousness (religion, law) and then on ‘the forms of political economy’ (Ibid.). However, in stepping into capital’s social universe of forms we move into a system where these social forms constitute closure for us (Holloway, 2015b, p.23); a labyrinth, with no apparent way out. Therefore, we have to intellectually blast our way out through the force of critique to get back to ourselves – where we get to see that we created this infernal labyrinth of social forms through the power of labour (our labour). Holloway and Bonefeld, in many of their works indicate how the categories of capital occlude the labour (our doings, human practice) involved in creating and maintaining capital’s social forms. Thus:

Capital is a study of the self-negation of doing. From the commodity, Marx moves on to value, money, capital, profit, rent, interest – ever more opaque forms of the occultation of doing, ever more sophisticated forms of the suppression of the power-to [do]. Doing (human activity) disappears further and further from sight. Things rule (Holloway, 2002c, p.47).

Capital’s social forms – value-form, money state etc. – are transformed, by processes that seem like alchemical transmutation, but the force of critique can crack open, split these categories to get to the human practice (our labour) underpinning and supporting them and their various transformations. The occult nature of these social forms flows from their existing ‘in the form of something’ else (Holloway, 2010c, p.914 – original emphasis). Thus:

…when we say that something exists in the form of something, we have to understand this as meaning in-against-and-beyond the form of. To say that useful labour exists in the form of abstract labour is to say that abstract labour is the negation of the particular characteristics of concrete or useful labour, we can say that it exists in the “mode of being denied” (Gunn, 1992, p.14) (Holloway, 2010c, p.914 – original emphases).

In this way, abstract labour becomes the mode of existence (the social form of) concrete labour, and the commodity form is the mode of existence of productive labour (Moraitis and Copley, 2017, p.110). Abstract labour becomes ‘value-producing, capital-producing wage labour’ (Holloway, 2010c, p.914). Social form analysis indicates that ‘capitalist categories do not have a transhistorical validity’ and ‘they belong to the society from which they spring’ (Bonefeld, 2010, p.262).

ΘΘΘΘΘ

Forty years ago (and still today) the question of what makes capitalist education specifically capitalist in nature beguiled (and beguiles) me, as I noted earlier. What is it about capitalist education (what goes on in schools, colleges and universities) that warrants us saying that it is a particularly capitalist social form? In my view, social form analysis enables us to answer this question. Thus, for me, the question changed: what is the social form of education in capitalist society? What is its mode of existence? Addressing these questions seemed to me to be the key to answering the original question I posed to myself 40 years ago about the nature of capitalist education. Furthermore, it also seemed to me that all social phenomena in capitalism are bathed in its darkness and opacity: they all take on forms specific to capitalist society.

With this outlook on social form, I went on to think about the starting point for moving into the dark, labyrinthine caves of capital’s social forms; a starting point that would allow me to answer the question of the social form, the mode of existence, of education in capitalist society. My BERA Conference paper of 2000 (Rikowski, 2000) convinced me (if nobody else) that the starting point should be labour-power as a commodity. However, through engaging in work and struggles around the business takeover of education in England I came to see that there were two commodity-forms, two starting points for grasping and critiquing capitalist education. These two starting point derived from Marx’s distinction between labour-power as the unique commodity in capitalist society whose expenditure through labour in the capitalist labour process produces value over-and-above that which it takes to maintain itself as labour-power (expressed as the wage); and, all other commodities – the ‘general class’ of commodities, which Marx deals with in Capital.[26] In his Theories of Surplus Value – Part I (Marx, 1863) Marx makes this distinction explicit:

A commodity must be … conceived as something different from labour itself. Then, however, the world of commodities is divided into two great categories:

On the one side, labour-power

On the other side, commodities themselves

(Marx, 1863, p.171 – original emphasis).

Two earlier papers (Rikowski, 2015 and 2018) worked through the implications of Marx’s two-fold commodity-form for education crisis, and specifically for education crises as crises for capital, so I will not repeat that analysis here. What could be added is that it becomes clear that education can take the form of, have a mode of existence as crises for capital. Secondly, capitalist education takes on the guise of two specific commodity-forms, and it is the development and strengthening of these forms in educational institutions in contemporary society that indicates the becoming of capital (Marx, 1857) in education: education becoming capitalist education. Analysis of education in terms of its social form(s) in contemporary society uncovers these developing commodity-forms; hence, the importance of social form analysis. The becoming of capital is the becoming of its social forms, in education and throughout capital’s social universe. Therefore, critique of the two commodity-forms in education, stopping their development in schools, colleges and universities (attacking capital at root, radical incision), and forging magical alternatives where these commodity-forms are outlawed, is a necessary project for revolutionary educators today.

Summary and Conclusion

This paper presupposes that we are committed to the termination and transcendence of capitalist society, including its educational forms as capitalist education. Therefore, Marxism in this light becomes a radical science that intellectually disrupts and ruptures capitalist society and its educational forms, whilst simultaneously creating alternative social arrangements that seek foundations within non-capitalist social relations, and this is inclusive of educational formations. In this light, Marxism is a theory for us as:

[1] Marxism is the most fully developed theory adequate to the task of intellectually locating weaknesses in the rule of capital; this is what Marxism can do better and more comprehensively than any other theory. It is precisely because of our feelings of weakness in the face of capital that we need Marxism: it gives us the capacity to locate capital’s weaknesses however ferocious, aggressive and monolithic it appears. Specifically in relation to capitalist education, in contemporary society education is involved in the social production of labour-power: the single commodity that fuels the expansion of capital as it is transformed into labour in the capitalist labour process and produces new value, surplus-value. This is a massive vulnerability for capital, as we, us labourers and potential labourers (e.g. students, the unemployed and the whole of the Reserve Army of Labour) possess this magical commodity within our personhoods, yielding the source of our power, the power of labour, and the social power of teachers who have significant inputs into the social production of labour-power. Teachers have the capacity to subvert, to put in question the social of labour power. They can also devise alternative, co-operative forms of education where labour-power production for capital is critiqued and denigrated. For me, these considerations alone would be enough for embracing Marxism in general and Marxist educational theory in particular. But others might want more!

[2] Secondly, Marxism is the most powerful theory of crisis we have today. Crisis in capitalism exposes fragilities in the existence and rule of capital, and for me this is crucial for us labourers, ourselves as labour, as capital is dependent on us yet we can free ourselves from it and survive and thrive through revelling in the communist impulse, the communising dance. This embrace of crisis includes grasping how crises in education can become crises for capital (Rikowski, 2018). Marxism is a theory of crisis; capitalist crises have at their centre social relations, and these are the subject of capitalist crises, and reveal a failure of capital to control labour adequately for its expansion and vitality.

[3] Thirdly, Marxism is not just a theory of critique, a way of critiquing or some kind of methodology, it is critique. Marxism is critique; the relentless critique of ‘all that exists’ (Marx) in capitalist society. Because it dissolves all of capital’s social forms and phenomena in critique it can point the way towards the kinds of social life we can build when excluding capitalist social relations. We can build these new lives now, and we have done some of this work already as communism already exists as a suppressed form of life within capitalist society. We do not have to wait for the ‘right conditions’ to appear as they have been with us for some time! The critique of capital’s educational forms, especially its commodity-forms has hardly begun, but the work that has been done so far indicates that, if we are to create the kinds of educational forms that we say we want, then we have to develop alternatives to ‘education by the state’ – and these are beginning to emerge.

[4] Fourthly, as Marxism is a negative theory par excellence, it insulates itself more than any other theoretical formation against attempts to redeem capitalism in some way or other. Whilst crisis, critique and strategy through Marxism generate and enhance hope for a communising existence and the flowering of practical activities flowing form the communist impulse, negativity gives us strength. It sharpens the sword of critique. In education there are tempting developments, policies and emotional hooks that can appear as hope within capitalism. Lifelong Learning, the Learning Society, preparing young people for the Knowledge Economy, the Wonders and Marvels of a Fetishised Information and Communications Technology perspective, and so on: these can be enchanting! They can beguile and excite us, be affective! These moments are when negativity and the will to negate are most welcome. Yet there are also times for positivity: our alternatives to capital’s social forms, our practical experiments aimed at breaking out of capital’s orbit can be moments of joy! Moments of love for what we have achieved.

[5] Marxism is to be advocated as it focuses on capital’s social forms. The more we explore these social forms then, incrementally and correspondingly, we lose ourselves. We get lost in capital’s social forms but to enter the labyrinth (as Marx does in Capital, right from the first sentence), is absolutely essential for destroying capital. Social form analysis tells us how to dismantle (intellectually and practically) capital from the inside, which is the only way it can be taken apart. The analysis of education in terms of its social forms in contemporary society uncovers the commodity-forms developing in and through capitalist education. The becoming of capital is the becoming of its social forms, in education and throughout capitalist society. Therefore, if we are serious about terminating capitalism then critical social form analysis is essential. As radical educators, given the knowledge and experiences we all have, then this is what we should do: critique capital’s social forms, go back to ourselves, our human practices (seeing ourselves as creators of these forms, partaking in their fetishisation) – and then create social relations and modes of activity that leave all this behind.

To conclude:

If We are the Crisis of Capital,

And Marxism is Our Theory,

Then Marxism is the Intellectual Crisis of Capitalism

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Glenn Rikowski

Draft: 22^nd July 2018, Forest Gate, London

Contact: Rikowskigr@aol.com

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[1] Fragile, from the 1987 album Nothing Like the Sun, by Sting.

[2] From: Dumb and Dumber (1994, New Line Cinema), a film with Jim Carrey as Lloyd Christmas, and Jeff Daniels as Harry Dunne. See: http://www.moviefanatic.com/quotes/i-cant-believe-it-life-is-a-fragile-thing-har-one-minute-youre-c/ [Accessed 12 May 2015].

[3] As Holloway notes, ‘…the hope for humanity lies in finding the weakness of that strength, its [capital’s] fragility’ (2005, p.273) – emphasis added).

[4] Merrifield deals with this to some extent, but only right at the end of his Magical Marxism (2011, pp.186-188). It is rather like writing about witchcraft and focusing only on White Witchcraft (the ‘good’, cuddly side of witchcraft) but not mentioning Black Witchcraft. David McNally deals with this dystopic aspect of Marxism better than Merrifield (in McNally, 2011), as does the band Nordic Giants, in albums such as A Séance of Dark Delusions, and Dismantle Suns.

[5] See Holloway (2016, Part One, pp.1-29) for who ‘We’ are.

[6] For more on the social production of labour-power in capitalism, see: Rikowski (2002a, pp.131-135) and Rikowski (2002b, pp.193-196).

[7] Though Bill Dunn (2014) argues that Marx does indeed have a theory of crisis; in fact, notes Dunn, four types of crisis theory can be derived from Marx’s body of work: wage-push theories; theories of under-consumption and overproduction; disproportionality theories; and finally the classic tendential fall in the rate of profit (see Dunn, 2014, pp.62-73).

[8] The outline of ‘crisis’ here owes a lot to Rikowski (2015, pp.8-9).

[9] Of course, there is also always room for debate about whether a single crisis or two separate crises is involved here. This is similar to whether a ‘double-dip recession’ comprises a single economic recession of two moments, or two separate recessions.

[10] Ancient Greek drama provided another reference point for the notion of crisis as turning point. In such plays as Antigone by Sophocles, the ‘crisis’ is the turning point in the play when two opposing elements or forces clash with the highest degree of intensity – leading to resolution or destruction. See Shallice (2012) and de Boer (2013) for more on this point. Gamble (2009) notes plays (generally): ‘are structured so that they build to a climax, which is resolved in a way that makes sense of everything that has happened up to that point. The notion of crisis as a turning point is evident again here, the moment when a decisive change for the better or worse is imminent’ (p.39). In addition, Law (2014) points towards the idea of crisis being related to religious (e.g. apocalyptic visions) and legal considerations (e.g. when juries report their decisions to courts). Samman (2015) provides theological examples (p.4).

[11] The rest of this section leaves Rikowski (2015) behind, adding new material.

[12] From the Cambridge English Dictionary: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/blind-spot

[13] Though Arendt skips around, and the subject of the crisis in education changes a number of times.

[14] Paulsen (2014) indicates the extent of idleness at work as a form of workplace resistance. The ‘slacking’, ‘soldiering’ and the ‘organization of idleness’ and other aspects of time-wasting at work are explored through well-crafted ethnographic material. In the same spirit, see Bolchover (2005) on office life.

[15] Translated as ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’ at: https://wwwmarxist.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09htm

[16] As Holloway notes: ‘…the focus on the fragility of capitalism points in the direction of exploiting that fragility now, opening up cracks in the texture of domination wherever we can’ (2005, p.273).

[17] Though Rita Felski explores the use of critique in the humanities generally and literary criticism specifically, the outlook can be applied more widely to the social sciences.

[18] As Isabell Lorey (2008) demonstrates, there is nothing new in what Butler and Applebaum say regarding the suspension of judgment. She outlines how Kant advocated this suspension in the critical process, with the rider that the analysts eventually comes back to it (p.4).

[19] I will critique post-critical philosophy and post-critical pedagogy in future works.

[20] Whilst Alhadeff-Jones (2010) notes that the concept of ‘critical’ also derives from ‘the Latin expression criticus, originally used in a medical context’ (p.27).

[21] For Holloway, ‘capitalism is pregnant with communism’ (2005, p.271), but for me the baby has already been born, and we need to see that it grows and thrives. Indeed, millions of such babies have been born!

[22] As it seems to be the case with Applebaum (2011), who advocates ‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructuralist’ critique that ‘encourages an interrogation of foundational concepts through examining how they work, what they foreclose, and what new possibilities such critique can open up’ (p.55); which seems to degenerate into mere analysis of concepts allied to an obsession with a radical criticality regarding metaphysics, particularly epistemology (our ‘foundational concepts’) and the destruction of metanarratives.

[23] If this is so, then, when embarking on a critique of capitalist education we should presumably start out from the notion of academic labour (which would include the labour of students, technicians, classroom assistants and other allied workers, as well as teachers, college and higher education lecturers). In this light, the special issue on Academic Labour in Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor (No.28, 2016), edited by Karen Gregory and Joss Winn is pertinent, as is Richard Hall’s forthcoming book on academic labour: The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for Autonomy Inside the University (Palgrave Macmillan, Marxism and Education Series, 2018).

[24] In his 2016 book, Holloway argues that Dignity might be our starting point; where ‘We’ start from in our outrage against capital (p.5).

[25] Work on the development of the general class of commodities within education institutions resulted in publications such as Rikowski, 2001, 2003 and 2005 – and all my writings on education, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), that went along with various political campaigns and initiatives I was involved in at the time.

[26] A point denied by Terry Wrigley. At the Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues (MERD) Seminar of 3rd May 2017, under the theme of “Education from Brexit to Trump … Corbyn and Beyond?‟ Terry Wrigley presented a paper where he argued that the main aim of education under neoliberalism was the creation of labour-power. When challenged on this, that neoliberalism is also about forming general commodities in education institutions, he denied that commodification processes in education had anything to do with the general class of commodities. He asked for examples: I gave him one, and he refused to accept it! I also pointed to Marx‟s distinction between the two great classes of commodities in Theories of Surplus Value – Part I (above), which Wrigley ignored.