In many ways it is easier to write about the application of Marx’s work within education than it is to write about any strictly defined “educational” import of Marx’s own writing. Regarding the former, Marxism has had a dramatic and powerful influence over all aspects of education, not only in the West but across the world. The Soviet Union as was and the Republic of China are two examples of how Marx’s critique of bourgeois economies and social relations were transformed, in different ways, into general programmes of compulsory “State” education which aimed at advancing new forms of social relations and new societies. Also, many poorer parts of the world have used Marxism as an educational tool either to promote revolutionary change or to maintain it.

Of significance in the West has been the Marxism of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. His book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) continues to be an example of how Marxist revolutionary politics can be worked into educational theory and practice. This kind of education has become known as critical (sometimes dialogical) pedagogy, and it involves teachers using classrooms for a critique of bourgeois ideology or the worldviews of the oppressors. The views of the oppressed themselves, the students, are given a voice and a legitimacy. They are not suppressed by a dominant teacher who tells them “how it is” and “what they must do.” Instead teachers and students seek to challenge traditional models of their relationship, working through together, in a mutual dialogue, how the world is and naming it according to these suppressed interpretations. For Freire this praxis is revolutionary because the ideas, language, and concepts of the oppressed will threaten and potentially overcome the bourgeois relations of domination, both in education and in the wider society. At its root, this critical education aims to undermine bourgeois ideology and to transform undemocratic forms of society into free and democratic socialist societies. This kind of critical pedagogy has enjoyed a vitality in the West, particularly in North America, although there are other strains, most notably in Europe from the critical theory of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas. A particular tension in this strain of critical pedagogy, given its origins, is that it concentrates very heavily on the ideological and other obstacles which block revolutionary change, offering a somewhat negative and pessimistic diagnosis. Habermas alone is held to be one critical theorist who maintains a more optimistic vision (see, for example, his two volume book, The Theory of Communicative Action1989, 1991, and R.E. Young’s A Critical Theory of Education: Habermas and our Children’s Future1989).

Another way in which Marxism was applied to education in the West was as a theoretical perspective with its own concepts and frameworks by which the theory and practice of education in capitalist societies could be understood. Marxist perspectives of this kind were prevalent in philosophy, sociology, politics, and economics. What they had in common was a critique of all aspects of Western educational provision, seeing such provision as another superstructural element which reproduced but never challenged the existing order of inequality and exploitation. Speaking sociologically for a moment, education was identified as one of the key bourgeois institutions – Althusser (1984) remarked that with the decline of the Church it was now the key institution – by which the bourgeoisie were able to ensure their continued ownership of the means of production. The values which schools passed on to their students, the attitudes they inculcated, the behavior and respect for authority they demanded, and even the time keeping and regular work practices they imposed were seen as both a preparation of the next generation of laborers for an uncritical and docile acceptance of the relations of production and an ideological reproduction of modern bourgeois social relations as “natural.” Each element of the curriculum was identified as playing its part here. For example, physical education extolled competition among human beings as a true representation of human nature and rewarded those who were successful in overcoming the challenge of their rivals; history sought to ensure a new generation who viewed world events from the perspective of the imperialist masters and not from that of those forced into slavery; home economics gave the impression that housework was the “natural” domain of women. Marxist feminists developed arguments about this patriarchal aspect of the way schools serve as ideological tools of the bourgeoisie.

Marxism as a critical perspective in the social sciences was perhaps at its weakest in two areas. First, many argued that its thesis about the structural features of ideology – that ideology was built into the system and would corrupt all attempts to overthrow it – was overdeterministic. It seemed to suggest that human beings were somewhat helpless in the face of those structures and particularly helpless against the power of capital not only to abstract all objects into commodities but also in a similar way all relations between people. The failure of the working class in most European countries to mount a revolutionary challenge was explained in this way. Second, and contradicting this view, others suggested that a Marxist critique which could see through the process of commodification and its consequent effects on day to day perception of reality had already in some senses overcome these ideological distortions, and that therefore the production of a different kind of consciousness, one which was potentially revolutionary, was still possible. These two opposing positions have, for us, an educational relationship. If ideology has totally triumphed, then its critique may no longer be possible, reduced to mere repetition of objectified (bourgeois) social relations. If ideology can be overcome, then those who say so find themselves in a dominating, more “educated” position than those who remain “unenlightened.” As with any such vanguard, they could be charged with legitimizing a hierarchy of knowledge and a legitimation and of a kind of “intellectual tyranny” whereby they were able to justify themselves as able to make decisions on behalf of those who did not yet understand the world “correctly.”

Viewed in this way Marxism has an educational dilemma at its very core. This comes into view when education is understood not as the accumulation of facts and knowledge – what might be called mere abstract or empirical education – but rather as the experience of the oppositions and contradictions which empirical education generates. This latter can be called a “philosophical” education (after Hegel). As such, the dilemma of authority and legitimation which lies at the heart of Marxist theory and practice is, for us, an educational experience born out of what is called the “dialectic of enlightenment.” In Marxism, “enlightened” theory dominates practice and practice generates experiences of failure and repetition which return us again to (enlightening) theory. This aporia has always been Marxism’s own dialectic of enlightenment. (For details of this see Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment1979). However, Marxism has been slow to theorize this dialectic of enlightenment in Marx’s own work. I will return to this below, but in short the dialectic of enlightenment in Marx is repeated as the “culture” which is Marxism. That Marxism has consistently failed to recognize itself as a culture explains its repeated failure to explore the nature of modern experience and more significantly how we learn from such experiences. Using Hegel’s definition of culture, Marxism has not understood itself, its “subjectivity,” as a representation of its predetermined relation to universality by and within bourgeois social relations. This failure to learn about itself as representation constitutes an educational failure.

Marxism in this sense both represents and misrepresents Marx. In many ways the somewhat crude models of revolutionary consciousness or praxis which underpin the intervention of Marxists in the educational process stem from Marx’s own problems in working through the relation between the theory and practice, particularly in regard to subjectivity. To understand this, it is necessary first to rehearse in broad terms Marx’s theory of economic determinism. One brief summary on these ideas is found in his 1859 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. There he explains that how people come together in society to meet their needs for food, shelter, warmth, etc. is determined by the resources which are available to them at the time. We do not decide from scratch each time how to do this. On the contrary we inherit all of the achievements (or otherwise) of previous generations. Marx says,

… in the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitute the economic structure of society (1975, p. 425).

At the time Marx was writing, the material forces of production were those left by the industrial revolution, including machinery and factories. The relations of production are determined by these forces of production in that factories demand laborers to work the machines and demand capitalists to own both them and the products that are manufactured. The next step in the argument is that this totality of relations, capitalist and proletarian, appears “natural” and becomes the (economic) base “on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of legal consciousness” (1975, p. 425). In other words, the predetermination of the world as it appears to us according to particular material circumstances and levels of development is hidden from us. What we see we take as natural and do all our theorizing and philosophizing from this (mistaken) starting point, including our views about the law, about equality, and most significantly about “human nature.” Thus Marx is able to conclude that

The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness (1975, p. 425).

For Marx two things are of crucial importance here. First, the link between doing and thinking, or between the production of objects from nature and the production of ideas about nature, is already established. The species activity of mankind, as Marx calls it, is already a unity of theory and practice. Only under particular conditions does this unity appear to be irreparably severed, most notably those accompanying capitalist relations of production. Thus, and second, when mankind sees through these conditions it comes into conflict with the current relations of production. It sees that private property in particular and the separation of labor power from materialist activity are “fetters” which now prevent a different mode of production of material life. “Then begins an era of social revolution” (1975, p. 425–426) or of a conflict between a species alienated from itself and the bourgeois relations of production which predetermine that alienation. Putting these two aspects together, the proletariat is now setting itself “only such tasks as it is able to solve” (1975, p. 426) for it contains within itself both the development of new forms of material production and new forms of social, political, and intellectual life. In taking this step, in realizing mankind’s nature as truly “social” (or communal) Marx believes that “the prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation” (1975, p. 426).

In employing notions of “seeing through” and “overcoming” Marx’s theory of social revolution can be said to involve notions of “education” or “enlightenment.” As Kant had suggested in the previous century, enlightenment is man’s release from dependence upon another. For Marx there is no doubt that revolution meant a release for the proletariat from their bondage to a class of owners who represented (and enjoyed) the alienated labor of the workers. In addition one could say that the proletariat, in developing their own class consciousness and seeing through the illusions of bourgeois ideology, enlightened themselves regarding their own nature or species activity. But it would be wrong I think to see this (as Habermas has done in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity1987) solely as an enlightenment based on the philosophy of the rational subject. Marx has no theory of subjectivity precisely because of the difficulties posed by the dialectic of enlightenment within which subjectivity both is and is not its own identity. In Marx’s favor, as he makes clear in On the Jewish Question, the idea of the free citizen/subject is itself ideological and one which will be overcome when the political is redefined under new social relations. Exactly what that will look like Marx famously never tells us.

The lack of a theory of subjectivity protects Marx from slipping into bourgeois “natural law” theory but it also inadvertantly protects him from realizing the actual significance for “subjectivity” of the dialectic of enlightenment in which subjectivity is both thought and not thought. Marx’s philosophical education is in this sense one sided. It has been hard for the modern consciousness which lives in the illusion of modern subjectivity to find its own voice or expression in Marx’s work. The imperative which subjectivity finds in Marx is to overcome all illusory (bourgeois) representations of itself. The reasons that it has been unable to do so have occupied many twentieth century critical theorists who asked why modern subjectivity was returned again and again to itself in its attempts to change social relations. Yet there is just such an analysis of return in Marx with regard to capital. It is well known that the theory of commodity fetishism reveals how commodities enjoy the social relationships with others that really should belong to human beings. That social relationship, Marx argues in the Grundrisse (1973), we carry around in our pockets as money. What is significant here is that when money, our social power, is risked or circulated in the market, the loss of its social nature returns as capital. If the structure of Marx’s analysis of this economy of risk, circulation, and return is interpreted in a Hegelian way then the nature of this return is the philosophical (and spiritual) significance of the dialectic of enlightenment. It is the culture, the self-representation, of the bourgeois subject who is learning about and from the experience of its own illusory status as a person. In such a reading, the “culture” of commodities is return in the form of capital as the culture of reified subjectivity is return in the form of (speculative) experience. One social theorist to have forcefully argued this case is Gillian Rose. She ends her book Hegel Contra Sociology by stating that

… to expound capitalism as a culture is thus not to abandon the classical Marxist interests in political economy and in revolutionary practice. On the contrary, a presentation of the contradictory relations between capital and culture is the only way to link the analysis of the economy to comprehension of the conditions for revolutionary practice (1981, p. 220).

In his ambivalence towards subjectivity Marx left open the space for this cultural and educational reading. But much of the Marxism after Marx became the culture which dare not speak its name, refusing or suppressing its own actuality as a culture, and thereby refusing its difficult and contradictory relation to the universal which was and remains its goal. Marx and Marxism without culture and education cannot learn about its own part in reinforcing the forms of bourgeois theorizing and law which it sought to overcome. But as Rose concludes: “this critique of Marxism itself yields the project of a critical Marxism” (1981, p. 220), a project which is avowedly educational.