Marxist Pedagogy for Revolutionary Times: Crisis, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process

• In Event: 037 - Section on Marxist Sociology Paper Session. Pedagogies for Solidarity: Education for Collective Consciousness

Abstract

The world is in transition and embodies a new quality of capitalist crisis, structural violence, white supremacy, patriarchy, ecocide, and struggle from below. The polarization of wealth and poverty, democracy for a billionaire capitalists, and fascism for the masses is pervasive. Forces of protest, resistance, and rebellion are rising up. The times demand a revolutionary resolution to the crisis of global capitalism. With theoretically grounded and class conscious collective and inclusive leadership twenty-first century struggle can move toward socialism and communism as the reclamation of humanity and the planet. But, ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. The capitalist class owns and controls the vast means of education, communication, and cultural and ideological reproduction; and works 24-7 to inculcate their bourgeois worldview into the people. In this moment, the intellectual and subjective development of the social struggle is essential. The shared consciousness of the multinational, multiracial, multigendered, and multigenerational forces in motion, and political clarity about “which side are we on” are key to moving along a revolutionary path. This is a critical opening for Marxist intellectuals and revolutionaries – from the academy, from working class struggle, and from the streets – to take up this work as organic intellectuals in relation to each other and the larger movement. We share 3 Marxist pedagogical tools: 1. The circles of our lives and struggles curriculum; 2. a fact sheet on globalization, precarity, dispossession & state violence, and 3. the consciousness, vision & strategy model for movement theory and practice.

Authors

• Walda Katz-Fishman, Howard University

• Britany Gatewood, Howard University

• Jerome Scott, League of Revolutionaries for