Marxism, Education, and Dialogue

Abstract

Let us note that while many have long been intrigued and inspired by these epigrammatic quotes from Marx and, of course, other quotable quotes from Marx’s pen, others have become bored with what they perceive to be clichéd encrustations of an anachronistic social and political imagination. To my mind these are glorious statements of what we might take to be early intimations of the continuing power and resonance of Marx’s work and Marxism for human possibilities. The first deploys a play of metaphors by which Marx released so lightly and succinctly the contemporary problematic for addressing emergent forms of the human condition and its strategic aspirations for progress. It is a philosophical statement, but the central motif here is euphonious, melodic (perhaps even lyrical) and insistently optimistic, therefore, on the theme of the search to compose the music of human time, not as contemplation and passivity or even as active in consumption, but in productive work oriented to collective action, itself renewable in ongoing reflexive analysis, further action, and debate, the central themes invoked by the second quotation on the essentially educative nature of these processes. Just as significant now as then, Marx draws us into critical spaces where art and science merge, where action, purposes, and being are tangled in possibilities and restraints, ever busy, restlessly constituting circumstances of openings and partial closures.

We must force the frozen circumstances to dance by singing to them their own melody.

—Karl Marx (1844/1992)

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing and that, therefore changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.

—Karl Marx (1845/1974)