Marx and Education: working with the revolutionary educator

This paper positions education as productive work, i.e. radical labour. It argues that education is a deliberate and conscious process directed to the building of human capacities to labour for socialist transformation. In drawing on the intellectual resources left by Marx the objective of education is the production of the ‘revolutionary subject’. Such radical labouring does not frame ‘production’ from the perspective of Capital but from that of Labour. It does not take ‘production’ is its narrow bourgeois economic sense. Rather, it is cast in a broader historico-political frame that fully appreciates the radical potential of Labour and the power of labour. Marxian education is a form of socialist humanism that expresses the class agency as a productive process of simultaneously confronting and of participating in history.