Making Marxist Pedagogy Magical: From Critique to Imagination

• In Event: 41.084 - Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 41.084-14 - Imagining Education: Beyond the Logic and Learning in Neoliberal Capitalism

Abstract

In Magical Marxism, Andy Merrifield (2011) contends that Marxism has become too stagnant and predictable, too explanatory and stultifying. Workers and students don’t need any convincing that capitalism is a dead-end that has nothing to offer them. Young people can see through the pile of debt they accrue that capitalism has defuturized them. No critical pedagogy is necessary to lift the veil of ignorance, to engage in the process of demystification. At the same time, however, marxists have remained fixated on explanation and critique, spending all of their time documenting, detailing, and analyzing capital’s destructive tendencies. To reinvigorate marxism, Merrifield asserts, we need to rattle it up, breathe new life into it, transgress from within. We need to make marxism, in a word, magical. Merrifield’s argument is that, while marxism shouldn’t abandon critique, it needs to start imagining and dreaming.
In this paper I bring Merrifield’s critique and proposal into the field of critical education. I begin by demonstrating, however, that the critiques in critical education themselves are stagnant and, in some instances, counterproductive (Malott, 2016). I do this by examining the limitations of “neoliberalism” and, more specifically, its inability to capture the global contours of the struggle against exploitation, oppression, and dispossession. Critical education thus has to both engage in revolutionary critique and engage in the magical act of imagining futures, too. I next argue that this double-movement is not a political, economic, or social problem, but a pedagogical one (Lewis, 2011).

I do this first by turning to the three volumes of Marx’s Capital, strategically and selectively searching these texts for references to communism. What I demonstrate is that Marx figures communism in different ways and with seemingly antagonistic emphases. Whereas volume one focuses on freedom and decision, volume two concentrates on management and planning, while volume three synthesizes and extends these two different intensities. At heart then, Marx poses communism as a pedagogical problem, as a quandary that demands the intervention of magical educational thinking. Next, I make the claim that we have already been post-capitalist (i.e., socialist). I seek to reclaim the successful history of the international struggle of the dispossessed and exploited, concentrating specifically on the first workers’ formation, the Soviet Union (Szymanski, 1979). Our history and our present, I hold, have to be the real concrete stuff of our magical learning, experimenting, and doing. Critical education has failed at each of these junctures, and it is my hope that this presentation can serve not as a corrective, but rather as something that reinvigorates and motivates. As such, I conclude by offering a revolutionary organization in the U.S. as an example of magical marxist educators, calling on their imaginative Party program.

Author

• Derek R. Ford, DePauw University