Marx, Education, and the Possibilities of a Fairer World: Reviving Radical Political Economy through Foucault

Abstract

Marxism, we are told by politicians and the popular press, is dead. The Left, as a historical movement tied to the labor movement, is frozen over, caught between the collapse of actually existing communism in Eastern Europe and the triumph of global market forces. Union membership in the traditional industrial economy in the UK is dwindling as multinationals relocate offshore; even insurance, information, banking, and call-center jobs of the “new economy” are increasingly outsourced to India and other emergent economies literate in information and computing technology and English. China has joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) and committed itself to a postsocialist market economy. At a time of an intensification of inequalities between regions and, perhaps more significantly, between North and South—between the developed world and the developing world—the Left in Britain, the United States, and most of Europe seems ideologically gutted by the Third Way preoccupation with the social market and with citizenship “responsibilities” rather than with traditional concerns of equality and advancing rights. The best offer on hand seems to be a socialization of the market and an acknowledgment of its moral limits. Neoliberalism, in the age of privatization, reduces the state’s role more and more to one of regulation, rather than provision or funding of public services.

It is clear, even if one admits that Marx will disappear for now, that he will reappear one day. What I wish for … is not so much the defalsification and restitution of a true Marx but the unburdening and liberation of Marx in relation to party dogma, which has constrained it, touted it, and brandished it for so long.

—(Foucault, 1998: 458)