Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy

140 Pages·2022·1.177 MB·English

by  Derek R. Ford

INTRODUCTION i
ENCOUNTERING EDUCATION
ELEMENTS FOR A
MARXIST PEDAGOGY
ii ENCOUNTERING EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION iii
ENCOUNTERING EDUCATION
ELEMENTS FOR A
MARXIST PEDAGOGY
Derek R. Ford
iv ENCOUNTERING EDUCATION
Published by Iskra Books 2022
All rights reserved.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-0880-1258-1
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INTRODUCTION v
CONTENTS
Introduction:
Marxist Politics, Philosophy, and Pedagogy .........................1
1. Marx’s Pedagogical Constellation: Inquiry and
Presentation .....................................................................17
2. Anti-Colonial Encountering through Errant
Learning ...........................................................................42
3. Errant Literacy in the Zone ...........................................68
4. Postdigital Marxist Encounters ....................................86
Conclusion:
Sonic Encounters and Political Struggles .........................102
Bibliography................................................................... 124
vi ENCOUNTERING EDUCATION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The elements assembled in this book have taken on various forms
with different comrades and friends over the last few years. I want
to thank my students Summer Pappachen, Maria Esposito, Meg
Fosher, and Katie Swenson for thinking about wonder, stupidity,
and sound with me. An early version of the first chapter appeared
on Liberation School and benefitted from the insight of the editorial
collective there. Tyson Lewis and Weili Zhao helped shape the
second chapter, while Kiff Bamford helped with the third and
Petar Jandrić and Curry Malott helped with the fourth. Different
versions of chapters one, two, and four appeared in Educational
Philosophy and Theory, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and Postdigital
Sciences and Education, while a version of chapter three appeared in
Kiff Bamford and Margret Grebowicz’s Lyotard and Critical Practice
through Bloomsbury. Thanks, finally, to the team at Iskra Books
for their helpful comments and careful readings.
INTRODUCTION 1
INTRODUCTION
MARXIST POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY,
AND PEDAGOGY
It is common knowledge that Marx insisted philosophers
should not just interpret the world but change it. Yet many
forget, repress, or bypass (for various material and theoret-
ical reasons) the direction toward which he wanted to change
it, which was inextricably linked with what he studied and
wrote—with marxist theory, in other words. Marx made this
most explicit in a famous 1852 letter to Joseph Weydemey-
er, a comrade who emigrated from Germany to the U.S. and
fought in the Union Army against slavery.1 In the letter, Marx
writes that bourgeois theorists before him had discovered the
existence of classes and the class struggle, but that what he
proved was that the class struggle can lead to the dictatorship
1 Throughout this text and others, I don’t capitalize “marxist” to
draw our attention away from the individual Marx and toward the
class struggle of which his work was an expression.
2 ENCOUNTERING EDUCATION
of the proletariat, and that the “dictatorship [of the proletar-
iat] itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all
classes and to a classless society.”2 In 1852 he hadn’t, of course,
discovered the concept that would theoretically arm our class
in this struggle—surplus-value—but the project was consis-
tent throughout his life. It’s a project, however, that today
some—including but not limited to marxist academics—have
abandoned.
As such, it’s helpful to begin with a lesson that Louis Al-
thusser learned from Lenin, that what “a ‘practice’ of philos-
ophy, and the consciousness of what practicing philosophy”
entails is “the consciousness of the ruthless, primary fact that
philosophy divides.”3 The marxist tradition that orders prac-
tice above theory is often misunderstood because in marxism
there is no harsh binary between the two—such a binary is ide-
alist. Instead, marxist philosophy begins from everyday prac-
tices of production and reproduction or struggle and defeat,
proceeds through conceptual abstraction, before returning to
the real concrete with new thoughts that are hopefully more
correct, which means they will advance the class struggle at a
particular conjuncture.
The class struggle is, crucially, a fight against the capitalist
mode of production and for the communist mode of produc-
2 Karl Marx, “Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer,” in Marx and Engels
Collected Works (Vol. 39): Letters 1852-1855, ed. J.S. Allen, P.S. Foner,
D.J. Struik, and W.W. Weinstone (London: Lawrence & Wisehart,
1852/2010), 62-65.
3 Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963-1986, trans.
G.M. Goshgarian (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 13.
INTRODUCTION 3
tion. Althusser tells us that Marx “never provided a true, con-
cise, well thought-out definition of the mode of production.”4
Marx instead offered two definitions. In the chapter on the
labor process, Marx tells us how to distinguish between the
different modes: “It is not the articles made, but how they are
made, and by what instruments.”5 In this definition, a mode
of production is a way of producing articles of utility and is
determined by the means of production. Yet later, Marx writes
that production on an expanded scale “does not present itself
as accumulation of capital, nor as the function of a capital-
ist, so long as the labourer’s means of production, and with
them, his product and means of subsistence, do not confront
him in the shape of capital.”6 Here the mode of production
refers to “the way of producing in the social sense,” which is
“the whole process of production and reproduction.”7 Put another
way, a mode of production is about the means of production
and the relations of production; both of which constitute the
economic “base” of society. The relations of production are
who produces, under what conditions, and how they relate to
each other and—under capitalism—how they relate to those
who do not produce but own. A mode of production, then,
is not defined by legal or technical relations (even if it’s par-
4 Althusser, History and Imperialism, 67.
5 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): The
Process of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New
York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 175.
6 Ibid., 560.
7 Althusser, History and Imperialism, 68.