Marx and the Education of the Future - SAGE Journals

Policy Futures in Education, Volume 2, Numbers 3 & 4, 2004

Marx and the Education of the Future[1] GLENN RIKOWSKI University College Northampton, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT With reference to Karl Marx’s writings on education, this article outlines the education of the future as anti-capitalist education. In starting out from a conception of communism as the ‘real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx), it is argued that the anti-capitalist education of the future consists of three moments: critique, addressing human needs and realms of freedom. It is also argued that all three moments are essential for an anti-capitalist education of the future, but the emphasis on particular moments changes (a movement from moment one to three) as capitalist society and education are left behind through social transformation. In the light of this framework, Marx’s views on the relation between labour and education, and his views on education run by the state, are critically examined. In the light of the preceding analysis, the article ends with a consideration of two trends that are gaining strength in contemporary education in England: the social production of labour-power and the business takeover of education. Political responses to these are briefly explored. Introduction From the outset it is essential to avoid misconceptions regarding the nature of this article. First, it would be unwise to simply indicate ‘what Marx said’ about education and then seek to show the relevance (or otherwise) of his writings on education for projecting an ‘education of the future’. Some of his statements on education are anachronistic in relation to contemporary capitalist society. For example, Marx says that: As Robert Owen has shown us in detail, the germ of the education of the future is present in the factory system; this education will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings. (Marx, 1976c, p. 614) Yet in many developed capitalist countries today ‘the factory system’ has declined in significance since Marx’s times, and the production of services has become the dominant sector in the economy. According to a recent report from the Engineering Employers’ Association in the United Kingdom: ‘Mass production in Britain and other developed countries is over’ (Marsh, 2004). Mass production with huge factories has migrated to areas of the world with lower wage costs. A second potential pitfall for an article of the kind attempted here is to provide some kind of Redprint for education in the transitional epoch (the movement from capitalist society to socialism) or in socialism or in communism. There are a number of considerations here. Firstly, Marx held that the struggle for socialism must be based on the self-activity of the working class: the workers themselves must make history. Thus, he was reluctant to provide a Redprint for socialist or communist society. A Redprint would contradict and negate workers’ practical solutions to the movement from capitalist to socialist society. Secondly, the practice of lone thinkers projecting the ‘society of the future’ would run against the collective, democratic, and experimental and experiential nature of the socialist project. This is related to a third point: that those setting themselves up as ‘experts’ for generating Redprints for socialism – be they leaders of left political parties, academic

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Glenn Rikowski Marxists or Marxists writing beyond the academy – would be establishing themselves as an elite of people ‘in the know’ with regard to what socialism was and could be. Marx held that this was a dangerous procedure and signalled thus in the Third Thesis of his Theses on Feuerbach, saying that: The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one which is superior to society. (Marx, 1976a, p. 616) Thus, Marx was against people setting themselves up as superior to ‘ordinary’ workers, as if they and only they had the ability, foresight and knowledge to discern what socialist society would be like. This elitism had no place in the socialist movement for Marx. Finally, connecting with the previous point, Marx was keen to emphasise the creativity and spontaneity of the drive towards socialism, and to chart and assess the practical experiments of workers in this endeavour. Thus, for example, he enthusiastically followed the course of and wrote about the Paris Commune of 1871, where workers’ power was manifested in novel and exciting ways. Today, groups such as the Leeds May Day Group (2004) have also emphasised the creative and spontaneous and experimental moments of resistance against capitalist social life, and have argued for the development of alternatives (however fleeting) to it. They call these activities and events ‘moments of excess’: the creation of social spaces where ‘there is a real sense of subversive energy, freedom and possibility’ (Leeds May Day Group, 2004, p. 4).[2] If a Redprint for socialism was framed, then these ‘moments of excess’ could be judged regarding whether they were working towards the ‘true socialist’ design of the Redprint. This would inhibit the creative, energising and exciting moments of the struggle for an alternative society. Furthermore, as Marx & Engels make clear in The German Ideology: Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. (Marx & Engels, 1976, p. 57; original emphases) Thus, communism is not some end state of society that can be fixed by a Redprint and into which can be inserted an ideal form of education. There is no final destination. The social drive to form a truly human society is infinite, just as capital’s social drives (to create value, to enhance human labour-power) are also infinite (see Rikowski, 2000a). This article discusses some of the strategic issues that must be addressed if an ‘education against and beyond’ capitalist education is to become a reality with growing social force and significance. Whilst not providing a Redprint, it does at least indicate issues that those struggling for an ‘education of the future’, an education not tied to the development of capitalist society, might productively consider. In doing this it does not try to posit what the ‘classroom of the future’ might be like, but focuses instead on the social form of the education of the future and how this might develop over time. In the first instance, and in the main throughout this article, the ‘education of the future’ will be viewed as anti-capitalist education: a form of education pertinent to capitalist society and the period of transition to socialism – the process of leaving capitalism behind through dissolving its social relations. The following section on communism situates the way in which the education of the future is visualised in this article: as a kind of becoming, a developmental phenomenon with no fixed or end state. The next four sections explore some prerequisites for an anti-capitalist education. It is argued that schooling must incorporate three aspects to be radically anti-capitalist: first, critique; second, it must be linked to human needs; and third, it must open up realms of human freedom. On the basis of this framework there are then two sections that address some specific issues that Marx raises for the education of the future: the relation of labour to education, and the role of the state in education. Both these issues are analysed through the previously established characterisation of the education of the future. The final section moves on to examine two prescient trends in contemporary capitalist education in the light of the preceding analyses: the social production of labour-power and the business takeover of education. These are both forms of the capitalisation of education, with the former implying the capitalisation of humanity (Rikowski, 2002c).

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Marx and the Education of the Future Communism as a Suppressed Form of Social Life in Capitalism If communism is not a ‘state of affairs’, as previously noted in the Marx & Engels’ quotation from The German Ideology (1976), then it must be a social phenomenon that potentially already exists. As Michael Neary (1997; Neary & Taylor, 1998) argues, communism is a suppressed form of life within capitalist society. Through the ‘law of value’, the profit motive, the separation of labourers from the means of production, the existence of labour-power as a commodity to be bought and sold, and many other phenomena of capitalist society, the communist impulse is suppressed through the exercise of forms of capital’s power. Any movements to produce outside the orbit of capital run up against capital as a productive force, the state as a form of capital and, increasingly, global capital and its supranational institutions: the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO). There is a tragic element to this. As Moishe Postone (1996) indicates, it is not only the case that labour produces value and surplus value in the labour process – which is the lifeblood of the existence of capital – but labour also mediates all transformations of capital into further forms of itself (e.g. state, money, rent, etc.). The tragedy of labour is that we labour to create a vast, global social structure powered by capital (which depends upon us for its existence) that oppresses us, and limits and constrains human and social possibilities. We work to build our own cages. According to Neary & Taylor (1998), the struggle for communism is both the struggle against the constraints and limitations of capitalist social life and for a new form of human society. They stress that this struggle is not just against ‘institutionalised forms of capitalist power that exist as forms of capital’ (e.g. the state), but also against the contemporary form of: Human life itself, institutionalised as individuated biography and personality. The struggle for human life is not, then, only in and against these alienated forms of power, e.g. in and against the state (London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1979), but also in and against life itself as biography or personality. (Neary & Taylor, 1998, p. 10) Communism, therefore, is also the struggle to create new forms of personality and individual existence, as well as social relations and structures – unfettered by capital and the social phenomena needed to sustain its social universe. On the basis of the foregoing considerations, a key task for socialist educators is to indicate how education might play a significant part in these struggles. The rest of the article considers some, but obviously not all, of these strategic issues. It pursues the question of what an anti-capitalist education might be like in terms of its social form – the kind of education necessary for socialist transformation. For communist science, exploring the ‘education of future’ must at the very least address this question. The First Moment: critique of capitalist society and education If communism is the ‘real movement of society’, then what does this mean for schooling? What are the consequences? It will be argued that there are at least three moments within this ‘real movement of society’ as far as education is concerned. The first of these is critique. This is especially important in terms of what Geraldine Thorpe & Pat Brady (forthcoming) have called the transitional epoch – the movement from capitalist to socialist society. This moment of anticapitalist education entails a ‘critique of capitalist society, its forms of schooling and training, its markets, and so on’ (Gibson & Rikowski, 2004, p. 251). Breaking this down further, it implies a critique of all the forms of inequality in capitalist society – class inequality, sexism, racism, discrimination against gay and lesbian people, against disabled people, ageism and differential treatment of other social groups – and how all of these forms of inequality link to capital accumulation and value production. The content of the allied critical pedagogy indicates how these divisions, these insidious rifts, are embedded aspects of capitalist social life. But it is also indicated how people struggle against these divisions and how unity in difference can become a reality (with examples from contemporary society and history). The critique of capitalist social life has as a crucial feature the critique of capitalist work. Issues of alienation, boredom, the length of the working day, and so on can be key topics. Focusing on instances of how workers have attempted to subvert the norms and practices of capitalist work

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Glenn Rikowski would be worthwhile. Explaining the mode of exploitation in the capitalist labour process would be essential – how it is that value and surplus value are produced, and the various methods used to increase rates of absolute and relative surplus value. The necessary critique also implies an exploration of the perverted form of human life in capitalist society, and the ways that human life is being capitalised (the human as a form of capital – human capital), which is the real form of the transhuman in social life today (see Rikowski, 2002c). This unsavoury topic can be presented in ways that students find interesting.[3] Basically, what is required is a critique of all known capitalist social life. This first moment pushes to the fore the ‘negativity of all that passes for the “positive” in capitalist society’ (Gibson & Rikowski, 2004, p. 251). For example, ideas such as lifelong learning, whilst seeming immediately appealing (almost as good as ‘peace in our time’), in reality take on a horrific capitalist social form as a kind of ‘learning unto death’, where individuals fearfully prepare themselves for the next twists in the labour market by up-skilling and reskilling themselves (see Rikowski, 2004). The key point is that we need to encourage our students to be critical of all aspects of capitalist society, whilst acknowledging its advances over previous forms of society such as Feudalism and ancient societies based on slave labour. No aspect should be sacrosanct. The Second Moment: meeting human needs and education If the ‘education of the future’ was only about critique it would be dismal, but it would also not be enough. Developing within our students their capacities for critical analysis of all aspects of capitalist society only does not address the impulse to attempt to change states of affairs where perceived injustice and unmet human needs arise. Marx’s Eleventh Thesis in his Theses on Feuerbach does not only apply to philosophers. It applies to all – especially teachers and students: The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. (Marx, 1976a, p. 620; original emphasis) Critique of capitalist society in anti-capitalist classrooms and lecture halls beckons action designed to change society, including the constitution and functioning of schools and colleges. The point and force of critique are otherwise lost. Critique must be linked to human needs – in the broadest sense. An education of the future should be about seeking to meet human needs: of students, the communities they live in and beyond. Of course, defining what these ‘needs’ are, and how they differ from wants and desires, is part of a pedagogy of human need. Capitalism, as Marx noted in the Grundrisse (1973), continually generates new ‘needs’; commodities that in time seem indispensable to our daily existence. In anti-capitalist education, teachers and students problematise the notion of need in relation to specific examples before considering action for addressing it. Over the last 20 years or so in the United Kingdom there have been various attempts to get young people out into the community to contribute and ‘give something back’. This was most apparent in the Youth Opportunities Programme and the early Youth Training Scheme for unemployed youth in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Citizenship education in schools in England is a current example, though in a less practical sense. However, in capitalist society there is always the danger that students’ and teachers’ efforts to meet needs are appropriated by capital. Thus, the ‘free labour’ of students and teachers in these enterprises should not mean that other workers’ jobs are encroached upon to the extent that they are surplus to requirements, and, if this does arise, campaigns and actions could be held to attempt to stop this happening. It is actually quite difficult in capitalist society to attempt to meet needs without impacting on the labour of others and the profits of companies. In the early 1980s whilst employed in the Special Programmes Division of Coventry Local Education Authority, I was involved in designing Community Programme Schemes for the long-term unemployed in the city. These schemes had to have community benefits and meet real needs, yet could not duplicate what might be provided by the private sector. It was difficult to devise such schemes! The key point about this second moment is that critique is never lost sight of. In seeking to address community, societal and global needs, the process must have learning and critique – regarding how society is constituted and how institutions function – underpinning it all. Realism regarding what can be achieved is obviously needed, and for most defined needs campaigns, raising awareness and other such activities might be all that teachers and students can get involved in.

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Marx and the Education of the Future Linking with other agencies, pressure groups and radical groups may add strength to the efforts to change things. Targets should be realistic given the resources. The Third Moment: realms of freedom and education If the ‘education of the future’ was only about critique and addressing human needs it might appear to be both negative and self-sacrificial. An anti-capitalist education of the future should also point towards realms of freedom – possibilities for transcending capitalism and its institutions and processes (including capitalist schooling). Paula Allman (1999) has indicated that a pedagogy that incorporates ‘revolutionary (transformative) praxis’ (p. 7) must be able to present students with visions, however fleeting, of the kind of social relations that socialist society might be based on. It must also be able to show that ‘another education is possible’ through radically restructuring the relations and goals of learning. In her later book (2001) Allman describes her practice as a teacher of adult education students on a Master’s programme and the ways in which it is possible to work through to an education of the future via a revolutionary transformative pedagogy. She also discusses some of the limits and constraints imposed on teaching and learning against the grain in capitalist society.[4] As well as teaching and learning that constitute pedagogies of hope through generating possibilities and visions for socialist alternatives to capitalist education, this third moment of anticapitalist education has another aspect. This is that it must ‘speak to desires, wants and dreams’ (Gibson & Rikowski, 2004). It must incorporate the interests and wishes of the students and teachers in order to free their thinking and open up potential for pursuing questions and problems that are concerning them. It must also have elements of fun and happiness-inducing moments. Even the UK’s Department for Education and Skills (DfES) recognises that the needs and interests of learners must be activated for them to be motivated for deep and sustained learning. In the Department’s Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (DfES, 2004) there is a whole chapter on ‘personalised learning’. However, this denies personal interests and desires. As Education Secretary Charles Clarke says in the Foreword to the Five Year Strategy: Once the basics are in place and we want to move beyond them towards excellence, we need a new sort of system that is not based on the lowest common denominator. The central characteristic of such a new system will be personalisation – so that the system fits to the individual rather than the individual having to fit to the system. This is not a vague liberal notion about letting people have what they want. It is about having a system which will genuinely give high standards for all – the best possible quality of children’s services, which recognise individual needs and circumstances; the most effective teaching at school, which builds a detailed picture of what each child already knows, and how they learn, to help them go further; and, as young people begin to train for work, a system that recognises individual aptitudes and provides as many tailored paths to employment as there are people and jobs. (Clarke, 2004, p. 4 – my emphases)[5] It is clear from this that Clarke has no time for truly personalised learning. He thinks that this sails too close to the liberal progressivism of the 1960s in British primary education. Indeed, the Five Year Strategy advocates a return to school uniforms and house systems for all – two hallmarks of a traditional, conservative outlook on education. Personalised learning, therefore, as outlined above, is to be provided not on the basis of students’ wishes and desires, but on the basis of what is perceived to be good for them. Furthermore, on examination of Chapter 5 of the Five Year Strategy, entitled ‘Personalisation and Choice in the Secondary Years’, it becomes clear that what is really being offered is not personalised learning at all, but personalised assessment (a point to be developed in future work). This is another example of how something seemingly ‘positive’ is turned into negativity on the basis of denying students’ real desires, choices and wishes, and hence stands in need of critique (the first moment). Thus, we should encourage students to read and critique these monstrous outputs from the Department for Education and Skills! Radical educators might become angry, informed and cheerful (simultaneously) if they uncover the doubletalk and horror lurking within such documents emanating from the Department!

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Glenn Rikowski The Three Moments Related, and in Development Having outlined three ‘moments’ within the education of the future, it should be noted here that I am not arguing that these constitute three distinct ‘stages’ in anti-capitalist education: for critique, for human needs and for opening up realms of freedom. Neither is it the case that these moments correspond to the project of leaving capitalism behind in any straightforward sense. Thus, critique does not correspond to the transitional epoch, meeting human needs does not correspond to socialism and the realm of freedom does not correspond to communism. For the education of the future to be anti-capitalist education all must be present in varying degrees. This was implied in the discussion on opening up visions for students of alternative modes of learning and on visions that transcend capitalist reality and take on a reality of their own – though within contemporary capitalism these would be momentary and fleeting. All three moments must be present in order for teachers and students to glimpse an alternative social universe where the ‘laws’ of capital (value, the need to make profits, the terror of money, and so on) do not apply. It is the emphasis on the three moments that changes as the ‘real movement of society’ (communism) takes force, though this process will be anything but linear. There are likely to be fits and starts, with spurts of progress followed by reaction, and wonderful ‘moments of excess’ (Leeds May Day Group, 2004) punctuating the landscape. Critique will have to dominate in the current phase and in the transitional epoch (the movement from capitalist to socialist society), whilst the capacity to develop the other moments is enhanced. As capitalist society, with its private property, is left behind, meeting human needs gains increasing force and reality. Finally, the realisation of human freedoms asserts itself more fully when phenomena such as value, surplus value and the social relations of production corresponding to capitalism, as well as market relations, have been abolished. As David Black notes: Any ‘anti-capitalist’ revolution worthy of the name would have to break with the totalising and all-consuming ‘logic’ of capital from day one of any revolutionary transformation. In ‘teleological’ terms, the first stage of a post-value-producing society – proximate aims – would have to contain the higher social goal of breaking down the division between mental and manual labour – the ‘final’ destination. (2005, p. 55)[6] The breakdown of the division between mental and manual labour is a theme that is taken up in the next section. The key points here are that the three moments apply to all institutions of society, education included, and there is progressive development of the second and third moments as real social progress takes place. Yet even when value relations and the value form of labour have been abolished, there will still be a need for a residual anti-capitalism in society in general, and in education in particular. Capital is a social relation that has a unique capacity to virus any form of human activity, as I have indicated in relation to the business takeover of schools (see Rikowski, 2001, 2002a, 2003). Combining Labour and Learning: a radical integration Having provided a framework for thinking of the nature of the education of the future as anticapitalist education, this and the following section return to some themes advanced by Marx regarding the nature of education in the struggle for socialism. This section addresses the crucial issue of the relation between education and work. From the preceding analysis it follows that at the basis of this relationship is a critique of capitalist work as a form of education. Building on what Marx says about combining education and labour within the factory system in Capital (referred to previously) and in light of Marx’s statements on education elsewhere, particularly in The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels, 1967), a number of writers have outlined a notion of polytechnical education (see Castles & Wüstenberg, 1979; Waugh, 1988, 1996; Taylor, 1995).[7] As Taylor (1995) notes: The aim of polytechnical education was to combine physical, mental and practical training. Marx couched his proposals within the context of child labour. Instead of abolishing child labour, he believed that it should be regulated and combined with education. He divided children into three age groups. The amount of time a child could work would increase with age. (p. 20)

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Marx and the Education of the Future For Marx, argues Taylor, setting the combination of labour and education within the framework of the early Factory Acts in England was unproblematic and the combination of physical, mental and technological education with productive labour would ‘raise the working class above the level of the higher and middle classes’ (Marx, in Taylor, 1995, p. 20). Castles & Wüstenberg (1979, p. 7) outline a fuller notion of polytechnical education based on bringing together fragments in Marx’s work as follows: – A high level of education for everybody; – Overcoming the division between manual and mental work: polytechnic education is pointless if one person spends a lifetime doing purely mental work, and another only manual labour; – Removal of the distinction between working and learning, between school and work; every child should take part in socially necessary production from an early age; every adult should have the chance to go on learning, both at work and elsewhere; – Everybody must participate in planning and decision-making; once polytechnic education has given everybody an understanding of social aims and technological problems, there can be no justification for excluding anybody from the organs of planning and decision-making: a society with polytechnic education cannot but be a democratic society. As Castles & Wüstenberg (1979) note, this last point might seem as if Marx is talking about education in relation to communist society, yet the ‘education of the future’ is part of the struggle for a new society (p. 7); it is first of all anti-capitalist education, as outlined in previous sections. However, there is a problem with polytechnical education in terms of the combination of work and education, which Marx did not clearly foresee. This problem is highlighted by Colin Waugh (1988). In contemporary capitalist society the relationship between education and work has been reconfigured on the basis of capital as vocational preparation. In the United Kingdom this comes over in a variety of ways: producing ‘work-ready’ graduates, enhancing employability and in terms of work experience programmes promoting students’ ‘understanding’ of industrial and commercial life. Thus, educational institutions have increasingly been forced to view education (spurred on by education policy documents and initiatives, and encouraged by employers’ organisations in the British context) as labour-power preparation and development. Work experience schemes for schoolchildren, as Simon Frith (1980) pointed out many years ago, developed into mechanisms for attempting to habituate young workers to the capitalist labour process. They also aimed to show schoolchildren what ‘real’ work was like, whilst seeking to ensure that they ‘esteemed’ industry and commerce. Work experience in Britain, therefore, emerged from the second half of the twentieth century as a capitalist social form. What this discussion indicates is that any notion of an anti-capitalist education of the future cannot just take Marx’s writings on education and simply apply them to contemporary conditions. The rule of capital has widened and deepened since Marx’s day, with all areas of life in capitalism subject to commodification. Today, the relationship between education and work must be problematised – education must involve the critique of capitalist work. This, in turn, involves radical work experience programmes, as advanced by Roger Simon (1983). For Simon, work experience programmes might include, but must go beyond, the notions of skills, attitudes and personality traits perceived as being required for employability. For Simon, radical work experience programmes should aim to get students considering the following possibilities (1983, pp. 245-246): 1. What is the basis for the acquisition and expression of power in the workplace? 2. Why is it that some people in the workplace are treated differently than others? 3. How do the things that happen to people on the job affect other aspects of their lives? What consequences do they experience as a result? 4. How do the events in people’s lives affect their participation in the workplace? Again, what consequences do they experience as a result? 5. Do all employees follow specified procedures for accomplishing work? If not, why not? If not, what effect does this have on the production process? 6. Do students with different educational and cultural backgrounds experience work differently? Why? 7. How does the nature of the work people do affect their satisfaction with their jobs?

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Glenn Rikowski 8. What is the function of unions in the workplace? If a worksite has no union, why not? If it does, why does it? 9. On what sources of authority, physical equipment, and investment capital does a company or agency depend? How does this dependence influence the nature of work in the workplace? 10. What changes in either job requirements or job position can an individual make? What are the limits, if any, to individual initiative? What would need to be done in order for a person to define the nature of their work in the world? Allied to questions of the prevalence of gender and ‘race’ and other forms of inequality in workplaces, this would be a powerful set of research questions for students to take into workplaces, do the requisite research and get some answers – over 20 years after Simon first put forth these proposals. Of course, Simon realised that ‘it would be foolish to deny that such an oppositional vision must, on the face of it, sound naïve’ (1983, p. 246). He recognised the difficulties in education problematising capitalist work through a radical work experience programme based on researching real work situations. But this educational critique of work is necessary as an aspect of anti-capitalist schooling as critique (the first moment). That the capitalist state would no doubt seek to put a block on such programmes if they were tried by schools is not to be denied. The DfES, no doubt backed up by howls of indignation from the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors, and with ‘shock-horror’ media stories in attendance, would step in to try to save industry and commerce from the force of education and real learning about capitalist work. At this point we turn to what Marx says on the state, for it is relevant to this issue. The Eradication of State Interference in Education Although Marx was not averse to the state setting regulatory frameworks on the issue of the balance between education and work for various age groups, and he had no problem with the state organising revenue to fund educational activities, he was less keen on the state running education. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx, 1976d), commenting on the programme of the Gotha Unity Congress of May 1875 where the two principal German workers’ organisations united to form the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, Marx made this clear. He noted caustically that: ‘Elementary education by the state’ is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfilment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. (Marx, 1976d, pp. 30-31; original emphasis) Marx also criticised the Gotha Programme for arguing for a ‘free state’, noting that it was nonsense. For Marx: Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ standing above society into one completely subordinate to it, and today, too, the forms of state are more or less free to the extent that they restrict the ‘freedom of the state’. (Marx, 1976d, p. 26) Thus, the state must only provide a minimal legislative framework in terms of raising finance for education through taxation, establishing the qualifications of teachers and the curriculum, but in all other respects should stay out of education and leave pedagogic practice to teachers, students and the workers’ movement. What Marx feared in ‘education by the state’ was made clearer in a small work entitled ‘Wages’ (Marx, 1976b). There Marx argued that the only type of moral education the bourgeoisie understood was ‘indoctrination with bourgeois principles’ (1976b, p. 427) and that the bourgeoisie would never offer the people a ‘real education’ (1976b, p. 427). Given that Marx held the state to be a thoroughly capitalist state (as in Marx & Engels, 1967 [1848]), a state-run education would be one in line with the principles of capitalist accumulation and the maintenance of capitalist society, which is what we find today (as outlined in the following section).

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Marx and the Education of the Future What is being advanced here is that an anti-capitalist education needs to drive out the state in contemporary education and banish it to fulfil useful functions such as generating finance for education, setting qualifications and inspections. All this should be done in line with those that should really run the schools: teachers, students, other school workers, parents and workers and others in local communities. If this was attained, the problems with the state clamping down on radical educational experiments – such as the radical work experience programmes advocated by Roger Simon (1983) – would start to ease. As Brian Simon (1983) noted, Marx held that education should be a community function controlled by people in the locality, though I would argue that this rules out ‘local state’ control (through something like a Local Education Authority in England) as much as control by a centralised, national state. Obviously, ‘getting the state out of education’ is a huge task today when state intervention in schools, colleges and universities in England is so all-pervasive and intense. Yet this is the task Marx sets us and struggles ‘in and against the state’ (London–Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1979) in education would seem to be a crucial component of a strategy for anti-capitalist education. This would be particularly difficult to undertake today, as many seem committed to defending state education (as the state running education) in the light of developments that will be explored in the next section. Two Pro-capitalist Trends within Education, and Anti-capitalist Responses The previous two sections indicated that supporters of an anti-capitalist education of the future need to assess Marx’s writings on education critically. As Henry Giroux has noted: Times change. Different historical conditions posit different problems and demand a range of diverse solutions ... Any critical theory both defines and is defined by the problems posed by the contexts it attempts to address. (2003, p. 5) Certainly, since Marx’s times, things have changed in England regarding schooling. This section discusses two trends that are gathering pace in education in contemporary England: the social production of labour-power and the business takeover of schools. The intensive development of these trends under New Labour in England poses challenges and questions for anti-capitalist education as the education of the future. Trend 1: the social production of labour-power One of the things that have changed since Marx’s times is the constitution of labour-power in capitalist society. In the first two volumes of Marx’s Capital, for example, it was assumed that labour-power was ‘always on hand’ (Marx, 1978, p. 577). Today, however, national states are involved in the social production of labour-power for competitive advantage. This takes place through schooling and training, attempting to enhance the labour-power attributes of potential workers (school and college students) and those already in the labour market (which is increasingly also schoolchildren and college students). In a number of works (see, for example, Rikowski, 2000b, 2002b, c; McLaren & Rikowski, 2001) I have explored how education and training are implicated in the social production of labour-power (workers’ capacity to labour). I have indicated the (infinite) social drive to enhance labour-power quality: labour-power transformed into labour in the capitalist labour process creates value (the substance of capital’s social universe) and after a certain point surplus value, of which profits form a component. Thus, it follows that labour-power enhancement is a goal for capital; ceteris paribus it leads to more surplus value and profit. I have also indicated how labour-power as a set of personal attributes flows throughout the personhood of workers and potential workers (i.e. schoolchildren whose labour-power is being developed through capitalist schooling). Thus, the processes of enhancing labour-power are invasive and can be viewed as developing human powers and capacities as forms of capital (human capital), and hence result in the capitalisation of humanity (see Rikowski, 2002b, c). There are limits to this process, necessary ones based on a number of conditions too complex to go into here (but outlined in Rikowski, 2002b, pp. 134-135). The point of presenting this sketch is that an anti-capitalist education of the

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Glenn Rikowski future must embrace a politics of human resistance: resistance to ourselves being reduced to labourpower (human capital); resistance to being capitalised through education and training. Anti-capitalist Response to Trend 1: politics of human resistance Although the social production of labour-power has gained social definition since the Second World War and many governments seek to enhance labour-power quality (presented as human capital, which is the social form attained by labour-power in capitalist society), there is no politics of human resistance to this process. Moreover, there is no real sense of what such a politics is and could become. Researchers and educational theorists have noted the existence of the phenomenon (capitalist education and training as labour-power production) for some time, but this has not thrown up a politics adequate to dealing with it. The significance of a politics of human resistance is that labour-power as a phenomenon is capital’s weakest link in a double sense. First, the transformation of labour-power into labour in the labour process by labourers creates value and surplus value, the latter being the first form of capital. The whole system depends on labour-power. Second, labour-power is an aspect of personhood, and hence under the sway of a will that is potentially hostile to the social domination of capital in education, and indeed the whole of social life. Thus, an anti-capitalist education of the future might embrace a politics of human resistance to the capitalisation of humanity through education and training being implicated in the social production of labour-power. Education and training would be at the forefront in the politics of human resistance. Trend 2: the business takeover of education In a number of works (e.g. Rikowski, 2001, 2002a, 2003 – but also many others) I have focused on how, through education businesses, capital is virusing educational services in the hope of making profits. This is the capitalisation of education in another sense: in terms of creating value and making profits out of educational services. Since 1997 I have also been interested in how New Labour has sought to aid and abet companies in this enterprise (e.g. the Education Act of 2002 and the Education Bill of 2004) (see Rikowski, 2003). Anti-capitalist Response to Trend 2: a politics of what? Compared with the response to the first trend, there has been more of a political response to this second trend. There are a number of groups seeking to defend state education institutions from the encroachment of capital, ranging from trade unions such as the National Union of Teachers, groups struggling against the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) (which seeks to transform educational services into internationally tradable commodities), political parties to the left of New Labour and groups within the European and World Social Forums, to various radical, Marxist and socialist-education researchers, writers and analysts. The problem with this politics is that, although the process involved is clearer relative to the first trend and has perhaps more direct consequences for jobs and livelihoods, no clear strategy has emerged regarding what should be done with respect to education financed by the capitalist state but run by private operators. The key problem, coming full circle back to a point that was made earlier, is whether we defend state education or attempt to banish the state from education (apart from it playing a subordinate administrative role – after Marx). The latter seems a gargantuan task. Two recent publications show the vast divergence in strategies towards the state’s role in public services. Brendan Martin (2004) argues that the role of the private sector in providing state services and some former state services that have been privatised needs to be checked, and then the balance restruck in favour of publicly run state services. He calls for people to join in a campaign run by Public World, Public Services International (PSI) and Consumers International (CI) for a General Agreement on Public Services (GAPS), and lists eight ‘gaps’ in the provision of key public services that the private sector can never address adequately (see p. 35). For Martin, the ‘publicness’ of the state has to be strengthened; though he acknowledges that the private sector will always have a role in public services. On the other hand, John Carter & Dave Morland (2004) would probably

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Marx and the Education of the Future view Martin’s approach as ‘state socialist’. They see themselves as anti-capitalists coming from the post-structuralist anarchist, direct action, social movement and eco-warrior mix. They are not interested in working through and struggling for some finely tuned line between the public and the private sector in the delivery of state or former state services. Either way, the stakes are high. What analysis of Marx’s writings on education (which have only been examined briefly in this article) and approaching the issue of the education of the future through Marx indicates is that those seeking an education that is free of capital’s fetters face growing challenges. The two trends outlined here gain strength. It is also clear that an education of the future as anti-capitalist education cannot just focus on the question of pedagogy and what goes on in schools and colleges. It must also incorporate an approach towards the two trends noted in this section. It must address the encroachments of capital on learning and teaching and the social forms assumed by capital in contemporary education: labour-power production and the virusing of educational services. Notes [1] I owe this title in part to Castles & Wüstenberg’s (1979) book, which inspired it, and to Marx’s comment in the first volume of Capital that: ‘As Robert Owen has shown in detail, the germ of the education of the future is present in the factory system’ (Marx, 1976c, p. 614). [2] Examples of ‘moments of excess’ given by the Leeds May Day Group are: the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, Seattle 1999 and the anti-G8 protests. They also point towards examples in recent and not so recent history: the Italian autonomists, the English Diggers, the Naxalite rebels, and the Paris Communards. However, they also acknowledge that ‘moments of excess’ can take a rightist form: e.g. the Countryside Alliance in contemporary England. [3] For example, I use it as a topic in a group role play for a second-year undergraduate module in the Philosophy of Education. [4] See Allman (2001, ch. 6) on her efforts to inscribe ‘Freirean Critical Education in an Unlikely Context’. [5] At the time of writing (18-21 December 2004), Charles Clarke has just been replaced as Education Secretary by Ruth Kelly, a keen Blairite. [6] Though Black realises that there is no final destination: hence the scare quotes. Communism, for Marx, was the beginning of truly human history, not the end of history. Communism, as realising human freedoms and potentialities and the free association of workers, can always be developed further. [7] As Colin Waugh notes: Polytechnical education is the name normally given to the main Marxist tradition of education ... [and] ... has been put into practice only once, under circumstances which soon became unfavourable. This was in Russia in the early days of the Soviet Republic. The phrase ‘polytechnical education’ results from a mistranslation. It first appears in a document written by Marx and Engels, and the phrase he used was ‘technological training’. The person who translated this into German substituted a phrase which, if translated back literally into English, would mean ‘polytechnical education’. However, this doubtful translation stuck and was eventually used by N. Krupskaya, Lenin and others to describe what they were aiming for when they set about reconstructing education in Russia after 1917. (1988, p. 28)

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Glenn Rikowski Castles, S. & Wüstenberg, W. (1979) The Education of the Future: an introduction to the theory and practice of socialist education. London: Pluto Press. Clarke, C. (2004) Foreword, in Department for Education and Skills (DfES) Department for Education and Skills: five year strategy for children and learners, Cm 6272, pp. 3-5. Norwich: HMSO. Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2004) Department for Education and Skills: five year strategy for children and learners, Cm 6272. Norwich: HMSO. Frith, S. (1980) Education and the Labour Process, in M. Cole & B. Skelton (Eds) Blind Alley: youth in a crisis of capital, pp. 25-44. Ormskirk: G.W & A. Hesketh. Gibson, R. & Rikowski, G. (2004) Education and the Future: a transatlantic dialogue, in P. Feldman & C. Lotz (Eds) A World to Win: a rough guide to a future without global capitalism, pp. 245-252. London: Lupus Books. Giroux, H. (2003) Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Resistance: notes on a critical theory of educational struggle, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35, pp. 5-16. Leeds May Day Group (2004) Moments of Excess. Leeds: Leeds May Day Group. Available at: www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/wsf/london2004/moments-of-excess.htm London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (1979) In and Against the State. London: Pluto Press. McLaren, P. & Rikowski, G. (2001) Pedagogy for Revolution against Education for Capital: an e-dialogue on education in capitalism today, Cultural Logic: an electronic journal of Marxist theory and practice, Special Issue on Marxism and Education, 4. Available at: http://eserver.org/clogic Marsh, P. (2004) ‘End of Line’ for Mass Production in Britain, Financial Times, 13 December, p. 4. Martin, B. (2004) The Ecology of Public Services, Soundings: a journal of politics and culture, 28 (Winter), pp. 25-35. Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse: foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft), trans. M. Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original work published 1858.) Marx, K. (1976a) Theses on Feuerbach, addendum to The German Ideology, pp. 615-617. Moscow: Progress. (Original work published 1845.) Marx, K. (1976b) Wages, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, pp. 415-437. London: Lawrence & Wishart. (Original work published 1847.) Marx, K. (1976c) Capital: a critique of political economy, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original work published 1867.) Marx, K. (1976d) Critique of the Gotha Programme. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. (Original work published 1875.) Marx, K. (1978) Capital: a critique of political economy, vol. 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original work published 1878.) Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1967) The Communist Manifesto. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original work published 1848.) Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1976) The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress. (Original work published 1846.) Neary, M. (1997) Youth, Training and the Training State: the real history of youth training in the twentieth century. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Neary, M. & Taylor, G. (1998) Money and the Human Condition. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Postone, M. (1996) Time, Labor and Social Domination: a reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rikowski, G. (2000a) Messing with the Explosive Commodity: school improvement, educational research and labour-power in the era of global capitalism, paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Cardiff University, 7-10 September. Available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001610.htm Rikowski, G. (2000b) That Other Great Class of Commodities: repositioning Marxist educational theory, paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Cardiff University, 7-10 September. Available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001624.htm Rikowski, G. (2001) The Battle in Seattle: its significance for education. London: Tufnell Press. Rikowski, G. (2002a) Globalisation and Education, paper prepared for the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs Inquiry into the Global Economy, 22 January. Available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001941.htm

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GLENN RIKOWSKI is a Senior Lecturer in Education Studies in the School of Education at University College Northampton. He is author of The Battle in Seattle: its significance for education (2001, Tufnell Press) and co-editor (with Dave Hill, Peter McLaren & Mike Cole) of Marxism against Postmodernism in Educational Theory (2002, Lexington Books), which won an American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award in 2004. With Tony Green (Institute of Education, University of London), Rikowski runs the ‘Marxism and Education: renewing dialogues’ day seminars, which are held twice a year at the Institute of Education. Also with Tony Green, Rikowski is series editor of Marxism and Education, a series published by Palgrave Macmillan. Correspondence: Dr Glenn Rikowski, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies, School of Education, University College Northampton, Park Campus, Boughton Green Road, Northampton NN2 7AL, United Kingdom ([email protected]).

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