Abstract
Adult education scholarship has seen the resurgence and growth of Marxist analysis. This trend is part and parcel of the waning of postmodernism, a search for theory to help explain the growing economic polarization across the globe, and the upsurge in movements among those most negatively affected by the economic policies and practices of the past 30 years. As the global economic crisis and responses to it have put issues of class and poverty front and center, some may be tempted to assert that class is finally and justly rising to the top as the central axis of oppression after years of postmodernistic and left-wing neoliberal championing of the so-called new social movements. In other words, some may be tempted to argue that history itself is showing us that class trumps race, gender, and sexuality.
For the editors and individual authors of Educating From Marx, a class-trumps-all approach is not a Marxist approach, a Feminist approach, and most certainly not the Marxist-Feminist approach they develop. For these scholars, a Marxist-Feminist approach, based in “anti-racism, postcolonial studies, feminism, and dialectical historical materialism” (p. 211) surpasses the often clumsy and ultimately inadequate efforts at intersectionality and is composed of the following five elements: “(1) a theory of the social, (2) a theory of capitalist social relations and difference, (3) a theory of knowledge, (4) a theory of consciousness and learning, and (5) a theory of social change” (p. 4). These scholars have come to understand the social to mean “both forms of consciousness and practical, sensuous human activity” (p. 5) considered in dialectical relationship. Beyond an understanding of the meaning or experience of differences such as race, gender, and sexuality, here the effort is to understand the meaning and experience of differences in the context of how they “organize social relations” (p. 7) in capitalist societies. The nature of capitalist societies creates what these scholars call ideological forms of knowledge production. Beyond the common notion of ideology as a set of ideas, ideology is presented here, following Marx, as a distorted form of knowing based on understanding merely fragments of the social whole. Fragmented understanding, which does not conceptualize the social whole, leads to forms of consciousness that are uncritical and reproductive of unequal gendered and racialized social relations. A Marxist-Feminist approach understands consciousness and learning as praxis that is an ontological and epistemological relationship because it refers to the “uninterrupted process of meaning-making . . . rooted in our everyday experience” (p. 13). Ultimately, Marxist-Feminism is about human emancipation through a revolutionary critical praxis.
The Marxist-Feminist approach outlined and applied in this text gives the lie to commonly held notions that Marxism is economic determinism; that Marxism is unnecessary or not helpful for understanding racial, gender, sexual, or national oppression; that Marxism lacks a theory of consciousness. To the contrary, the authors in this text demonstrate the exact opposite of these notions and show us how adult educators need a Marxist analysis that is feminist and antiracist and analyses of gender and race that are Marxist in order to understand the challenges we face and to develop strategy and tactics to address these challenges.
The theoretical framework presented in this text is an innovative and major contribution to the field of adult education. It is innovative not only conceptually but also in its development, which is traced throughout the book. As the editors discuss in the first and last chapters of the book, the framework emerged from the various authors’ participation in an extended reading and study group. The theoretical framework is introduced in the first chapter. Chapters 2 and 3 provide further theoretical foundations. The rest of the chapters present expositions of the specific research projects each scholar brought to the reading group and through which the scholars collectively developed the theoretical framework. In other words, unlike many edited texts that include a collection of previously presented or published works on a theme, this text provides us with the original research projects out of which the collective of scholars developed their Marxist-Feminist theoretical framework. While the individual chapters show us the framework evolving as it is applied to a variety of specific research projects, they also stand on their own as important individual contributions to the field. Through this process, this text makes an important theoretical contribution to the field while also providing a template for an innovative use of the edited text as a product of collective study and research.