Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the central tenets of Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history reflective of his focus on modes of production, the active production and reproduction of ideology, and his theory of consciousness as a social product. It explores how his approach to both being (ontology) and knowledge (epistemology) precipitated a profound shift in philosophical discourse by positing the inseparable unity of active existence and thought thereby creating a philosophy of praxis described herein as a dialectical synthesis of theory and practice oriented toward transforming social relations. Praxis emphasizes the reflective human capacity to alter the natural and social world, sheds light on the historical specificity and structural foundations of that world, our ideological formation within it, and the conditions in which antagonisms take root. It then examines how the philosophy of praxis greatly influenced the works of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire – two of the most cited figures in educational thought – and how they incorporated and expanded upon Marx’s revolutionary formulation.
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Notes
- 1.
This notion of a succession of modes of production enabled Marx to critically historicize economic categories (e.g., wages and profits) that were conceptualized as timeless by political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
- 2.
Some have suggested that the very notion of immaterial labor has worked to obscure the basic reality of life in which the condition for survival still depends upon the ability to sell one’s labor power and has assisted capital in establishing the ideology that in a world of immaterial labor, capitalism has moved beyond exploitation (Camfield 2007; Cotter 2008).
- 3.
Although Marx himself rarely used the phrase ‘class consciousness’, he did distinguish between a class in itself and class for itself in the ‘18th Brumaire’ and elsewhere.
- 4.
Gramsci distinguished between the state which he viewed as an oppressive instrument used by the dominant class to exert control – through force when necessary – and civil society which is the sphere in which a dominant class seeks to garner consent to its rule through institutions such as schools, media, etc.
- 5.
As some of us have argued elsewhere, while some suggest that Gramsci precipitated a conceptual shift from Marx’s class-based focus to a form of neo-Marxism in which the struggle for cultural/discursive hegemony trumps class struggle, such interpretations are, arguably, suspect for they take Gramsci’s critiques of certain overly economistic/deterministic versions of Marxism to mean that analyses of economic/class relations are epiphenomenal to cultural considerations (Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 2008).
- 6.
This conception of the educational relationship is one of Gramsci’s many mediations on Marx’s third Theses on Feuerbach – namely that the educators must be educated.
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Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, V., Brown, B.A., McLaren, P. (2018). Marx and the Philosophy of Praxis. In: Smeyers, P. (eds) International Handbook of Philosophy of Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72761-5_44
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