Marxism and Education: [Closed] and ...Open...

CHAPTER 26 Marxism and Education [Closed] and … Open … Glenn Rikowski Keywords open Marxism – open education – closed Marxism – closed education – student as producer – labour-power – Law of Labour – communism – communisation – capital – reductionism – structuralism – functionalism – determinism – critique – social form 1 Introduction Capitalism appears to be a closed mode of life, a closed system: “there is no alternative” (TINA), screeched Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, there is nothing other than capitalism, with all exits illusory. Yet capitalism is full of holes. This does not mean, however, that, if we wish to flee capitalism, then we break forth and escape through these substantive and intellectual holes by going outside and beyond capitalist society. There is no beyond, no outside to capital’s social universe. Rather, the escape routes are internal to capitalism: they are more like burrows (which we have to dig, practically, and through intellectual attacks) that take us to capital’s core, from where we can cause its implosion. Education in capitalist society is littered with these holes. The first section indicates attempts by capital’s human representatives to plug them and to strengthen capital accumulation through various manipulations, channellings, ideological constructs and the forces of state, markets and money. This is followed by consideration of strands and trends within Marxism in general, and Marxist educational theory in particular, that nurture these attempts at closure. This is Closed Marxism: forms of Marxism that seek to terminate and debilitate movements for weakening the structures of capital in education through our anti-capitalist hole-making endeavours. The critique of class in this section indicates the failure of Closed Marxism to end our radical diggings. In contrast, the third section focuses on Open Marxism. This openness is necessary for a vibrant, hopeful and substantially effective Marxism for human liberation. It rests on openness in the critique of capital’s categories of thought © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2022 For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV 418 Rikowski and an openness in terms of our creating spaces that pierce capital’s surface and damage the social forms that supports its struggle for stability. The fourth section reflects on corresponding Open Education moments, protests and forms, with reference to Mike Neary’s The Student as Producer (Neary, 2020). The concluding section points towards an opening education, an education that opens up capital to critique and dissolution. 2 Closed Education In Theories of Surplus Value – Part 1, Marx notes that “… the world of commodities is divided into two great categories: on the one side, labour-power. On the other side, commodities themselves” (Marx, 1975, p. 171). These latter do not refer only to manufactured, hard commodities that are the result of value-creating labour in capitalist society, but also pertain to immaterial commodities, argues Marx. Labour-power, that other great class of commodities, is the unique commodity in capitalism; it is the only commodity that can create more value in its use (in capitalist labour processes) than it takes for its production and maintenance. Labour-power is the capacity to labour, which resides in human bodies as sets of skills, competences, knowledges, attitudes and physical and social attributes. In the first two volumes of his great work, Capital, Marx assumed that labour-power was “always on hand” and that money advanced as variable capital in the form of wages would “always finds available the labour-power into which it is to be transformed” (Marx, 1978, p. 577). But, for Marx, labourpower is a commodity, as noted above, and like all commodities it has to be socially produced, a process that Marx did not spend much intellectual energy on in Capital. Nevertheless, Marx held that “education produces labour power” (1975, p. 210), and I have explored what I have called the social production of labour-power in capitalism in a number of works over the last 30 years (see Rikowski, 1990, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2007). In contemporary capitalist societies it is more apparent that education produces labour-power than it was in Marx’s day. What makes the social production of labour-power particularly difficult to grasp is that it is institutionally fractured into nursery, primary and secondary schooling, post-compulsory education and training (including apprenticeships), and a host of work-based learning episodes, re-training, and the development of labour-power through work in capitalist labour processes. From the perspective of capital, education becomes socially validated the greater it is reduced to labour-power production. Obversely, educational encounters critical of this reductionist impulse, For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV Marxism and Education 419 and also educational spaces generating critique of capitalism, are anathema to human representatives of capital. Critical spaces in education institutions, research, theory and thought spark denigration, control and containment, and ultimately abolition when humans represent capital in educational life. In this light, it is no surprise that there are forceful channelling and funnelling processes in contemporary educational institutions where students are faced with induction into viewing their educational encounters as processes of labour-power preparation and enhancement for capitalist labour markets. These channelling processes include education managerial, governmental and associated think-tank urgings, media cheer leading, with capital-friendly academic injunctions (for staffs and students) to keep employability and capitalist work futures in view. As I experienced in my work in the School of Education at the University of Northampton, UK, the insertion of employability considerations into higher education curricula – right down to the individual module level – meant injecting the imperatives and love of capitalist work into educational encounters. Employability is a fuzzy synonym for labour-power, and apparently less demeaning than the concept of human capital that was prominent in governmental education policy reports during the 1960s to 1990s. A student at a talk I gave at the UCL Institute of Education, UK, in 2001 protested: “I am not a lump of human capital!” At the school level, governments instituting national curricula, such as England from 1988, found that they could attempt to confine students and teachers to engaging with relatively “safe” subjects, while ejecting troublesome ones such as Black Studies and social studies. In July 2020, a UK Department for Education document on planning relationships, sex and health curricula the use of resources from anti-capitalist organisations was discouraged for schools in England. Spaces for the critique of capitalism and its educational forms were compressed in teacher training in England in the 1980s with the ejection of the social sciences and philosophy from training courses. Although at the higher education level it is more difficult for the capitalist state to abolish academic subjects where critique of existing society is expressed most strongly – the social sciences, philosophy and humanities – funding priorities have been a proxy mechanism for attacks on opportunities for critical examination of capitalism. Thus, in the UK, funding has tipped heavily towards STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, and resources for other subjects have to be generated primarily from student fee income. While government presumes STEM subjects should be prioritised as they contribute more towards the capitalist economy, the downgrading of social sciences, philosophy and humanities subjects sends messages to school students and teachers regarding the relative worth of academic For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV 420 Rikowski subjects. Higher education teachers’ labour has been heavily monitored in recent years in the UK through first the Research Excellence Framework (REF) from 2014, and then the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), trialled in 2017, with one of its strands linked to employment outcomes, thereby strengthening labour-power enhancement under the guise of employability. In July 2020, under cover of COVID-19 considerations, the UK Department for Education published a document that heralded a “higher education restructuring regime” in response to the coronavirus. The document was principally concerned with funnelling labour-power enhancement through STEM subjects, with particular emphasis on online and digital provision, to meet local, regional and national labour-power needs, while attracting foreign students through digital distance learning. Meanwhile, during the COVID-19 phase, some ministers and Conservative MPs, with their right-wing media supporters, have railed against critical race theory and “Cultural Marxism” after the murder of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter. Critical pedagogy, the critique of capitalist society and radical thinking about alternatives to capitalism became constrained progressively by the capitalist state and its apparatuses since the end of the post-war boom in the UK. Attempts to stifle and eradicate critiques of capitalism in state educational settings gathered strength after the 2007–2009 Great Recession and COVID-19 has provided an alibi for bringing in more overt policies for dampening anticapitalist thought and action in education. The Extinction Rebellion (XR) school protests in 2019 were especially problematic for governments in many countries. Again, in the UK, there were government attempts to outlaw and criminalise XR activities, with pressure on Head Teachers to curtail the involvement of school students in the protests and Friday school absences. Governments ensconced in capitalist states have attempted to enclose education within capital’s embrace progressively, with acceleration in this process in the last 12 years. Human representatives of capital, humans acting on the imperatives of capital as they are partially constituted as capital, seek to encase education on the foundation of the social production of labour-power, while also waving in capitalist enterprises to run schools, colleges and universities – or functions and departments of these. They seek a Closed Education: education for labour-power production and enhancement, and educational institutions run and organised by capitalist (private sector) enterprises. There have been many forms of resistance to these developments, which Neary (2020) describes and theorises in detail and profundity in relation to higher education in the UK. It will become clear in the third and fourth sections why this Closed Education is impossible. Meanwhile, the following section indicates how certain strands of Marxism have colluded with the notion For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV Marxism and Education 421 of Closed Education through developing elements of closure to anti-capitalism and a bourgeois perspective on “class” and social divisions in education and society. Closed Marxism attempts to cordon off, to close our ability to theoretically dig into capital’s world and to uncover and destroy the social forms – including its educational ones – at its infernal core. 3 Closed Marxism Closed Marxism is squared by four concepts of the Marxist apocalypse, and in the centre of the box is the mainstream Marxist conception of class. The four concepts are: reductionism; structuralism; functionalism; and determinism. Utilisation of these closure-inducing theoretical props throws barriers against dissolving capital and nurturing the communist impulse in social-theoretical space, with negative consequences for worthwhile post-capitalist projects. These ideas place a smothering blanket over the garden of earthly delights: using them has the effect of closing off post-capitalist futures. A Closed Marxism holds them dear. Reductionism is based, first of all on the idea of their being a relation of determination between the economic base, or “infrastructure” in Marx’s original formulation, and the “superstructure” (politics, law, education and so on). That this base/superstructural (B/SM) methodological principle is first advanced by Marx himself in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1857 gives anti-Marxists easy meat for critique, and can generate confusion as in Althusser’s infamous economic determination in his “last instance” argument. This seminal Marxist reductionism can spawn an attitude towards reductionism in all its forms, as in the anti-Marxist writings of Michael Apple. From the B/SM, it is a short theoretical step to condemning all forms of reductionism in educational research and theory; to argue against reducing any educational phenomena to economic considerations. The B/SM model nurtures a bourgeois notion of separate fields or sub-systems within the capitalist totality. Thus, capital’s social world is split up into the economy, law, politics, education, and so on. The hapless social theorist then has the task of grappling with how these sub-systems relate, and how their boundaries are structured. This problem caused massive hand-wringing and confusion in what was called Marxist sociology of education in the 1980s and early 1990s in Anglophone circles. The B/SM model generates a structuralism that closes off the idea that we can dig our way out of capitalism. The structures, of economy, education, politics, and so on, set borders to our escape in this theoretical outlook. For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV 422 Rikowski Reductionism can also assert itself at the micro-level, as opposed to the subsystem level, and can even be hauled up to give substance to ethnographic interpretations in educational research, where the “economic” (often cloaked in terms such as instrumentalist or vocationalist, or various orientations to work) provides a background causal screen for participant responses and researcher interpretations. There is less criticism of this form of reductionism in education research as its links to the Marxist B/SM are less obvious. But all this misses the key point: there are real reductions in capitalist society. There is the reduction of education to labour-power production, as noted earlier, and there is also the reduction of labour-power to human capital; the human as a form of capital. For both, education plays key roles. Both are reductions through struggle, where labourers, students, teachers and other humans involved can resist, or subvert, or seek alternatives. Thirdly, there is also the reduction of education institutions or elements of these (departments, subjects, educational services) to value-producing sites, or movement towards this through marketisation, commercialisation and commodification processes in education, as witnessed in the business takeover and privatisation of education. Thus, the question of reductionism is at once an empirical matter, and also a question of class struggle where it is operative. Reductionism closes-off possibilities for anti-capitalism, on the one hand; but blanket anti-reductionism befuddles us through avoiding cases where attempts at real reductionism actually exist. Structuralism in Marxist educational theory has been partly dealt with above: it is a consequence of the reductionist outlook and vice versa, though real reductions do exist in capitalism, as noted. Structuralism in education theory and research spawns a plethora of theories and studies regarding how subsystems relate and how lower level institutional structures (schools, colleges, and universities) constrain the behaviours of students, staffs and other educational workers. Structuralism in education and elsewhere is about constraint, which is why some radical educational theorists, Marxist sociologists of education and Marxist educational theorists then swivel to agency; our freedom within the framework(s). Balances between structure and agency might be considered, or there might be an appeal to elaborate theories of “structure and agency,” as in the writings of Anthony Giddens. We are like hamsters is a cage; we can eat, sleep in beds of straw and cotton, play on our wheel, but we are always caged. Structuralism encages us like pet hamsters: capitalism seems to provide the overall cage and myriad sub-cages where we give performances, even though it is difficult to theorise the movements between them. Structuralism is a key component of a Closed Marxism. A flight to post-structuralism For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV Marxism and Education 423 (and post-modernism) is no answer either, as I have indicated in many works with Mike Cole, Dave Hill and Peter McLaren. Allied to structuralism in the Closed Marxist circuit is functionalism, a favourite strategic theoretical tool for those Marxists working within sociology of education, and Marxist educational theorists who have an unhealthy respect for the power of capital. Left functionalist accounts of developments and phenomena in education involve naked hypocrisy and bamboozling, as explained by Daniel Liston over 30 years ago: A functional explanation claims that an institutional feature or educational practice persists because of its beneficial consequences in a particular setting. The assertion that schools reproduce capitalism is essentially a functional claim. Although Marxists frequently employ functional analyses, they also deplore them. Marxists criticise functional analyses as positivistic, deterministic, and mechanical and yet, at the same time, they offer functional analyses to explain schools in a capitalist society. (Liston, 1988, p. 324) Thus, Marxist thought and writing that resorts to functional analyses in addressing education shores up capital, and gives its representatives extraordinary powers to absorb and redefine conflict as “functional” to the continuance of capitalist society and education. Attempts to undermine capital and its educational forms merely rebound on antagonistic intellectuals and activists as some functional consideration comes to capital’s rescue! Functionalist thought and explanation close off possibilities for anti-capitalist success in educational struggles. The capitalist state can be invoked to plug the holes as it is held to be the functionalist-inclined social entity par excellence. Functionalist thought plays a pivotal role in Closed Marxism: all that happens, in one way or another, benefits capital, its maintenance and continuance. An open future, for education and society, therefore, is closed off. Determinism is the fourth point of the Closed Marxist box. While this solves the structure/agency issue – coming down absolutely on the side of structure – it poses a problem for educators. I am not referring to the intellectual quagmire of philosophical determinism here, but the macro systemic notion that capitalism will collapse from its own internal contradictions: that is, capitalist breakdown theory. This notion leaves Left, radical and Marxist educators in a strategic quandary. If their efforts are of little or no avail in terms of terminating capital, and they merely await the working out of these “objective” conditions within capitalist development, then a number of possible options lay For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV 424 Rikowski before them. Here are two possibilities: waiting for the ripening of capitalist decline and dissolution (preparing for the revolutionary moment in the meantime, and organising for post-capitalist society); or, riding on the tiger of Accelerationism. The first would involve educators preparing students for a future that may be decades or hundreds of years away, and probably too late anyway to forestall climate catastrophe caused by capitalist development. The second (Accelerationism) would involve an educational project of boosting the social production of labour-power in capitalism as effectively and efficiently as possible! After all, capitalism must be speeded up, accelerated to its death. It would also involve waving in private operators into educational institutions! The first, waiting option, would involve educating for a future that might never arise, resting on faith that capitalism will in fact break down of its own accord. Or, after Rosa Luxemburg, we might just get barbarism rather than socialism. The second (Accelerationism option) involves becoming the Great Cynical Educator; attempting to integrate students into capital’s world when believing this form of social existence to be degenerate, and therefore students are merely fodder to feed the monster of capital unto death. In addition, it involves inducing for-profit operators into education with a smiley face! This twisted form of determinism sucks the life out of resistance and revolt in the present; it closes off the notion of making revolution now, and communisings today are undermined when set against the “real” and great happenings of the future. It closes off hope that we can grasp now. At the centre of these four corners of Closed Marxism is class, as conceived by those utilising sociological conceptions, and also by many Marxist educational theorists. This box people notion of class rests on classification (Holloway, 2002), and is of Weberian provenance. People are placed into various boxes, based on criteria such as income, qualifications, the status and skills glued to occupations, and other factors, and then there are attempts to explain or predict their behaviours in terms of these allocations, either as groups, or as individuals (as in ethnographic accounts). Besides technical class boxes to classify social status, as used by opinion pollsters and governmental population data organisers such as the UK’s Registrar General, boxes such as “working class,” the “petit bourgeoisie,” the “middle class,” and even the “capitalist class” and “ruling class” all have the same derivation: they all pertain to groups of people, rather than social relations. It is this that makes “class” a closed rather than open concept. Class is a system of boxes in this sense. On this basis, social mobility is movement between boxes, though individuals are always in some designating box or other; they are enclosed, trapped in social class. Education ethnographers seem to love exploring the agonies and delights of those moving between classed boxes. Thus, class, as commonly conceived, is a system of closure – which will become clearer as we drag class into an Open Marxist outlook. For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV Marxism and Education 4 425 Open Marxism The critique of class is a necessary feature of an Open Marxism. It can be counterposed to the kind of box people view of class outlined in the previous section. As Richard Gunn notes: [The] sociological conception of class faces the embarrassment that not all individuals in bourgeois society can be fitted in, tidily, into the groups which it labels “Capitalists” and “proletarians” … [and] … sociological Marxism has recourse to categories like “the middle classes,” the “middle strata” etc. (Gunn, 1987, pp. 16–17) For Gunn, class “is not a structurally or relationally specified “place” (or position) in the social landscape (a place which individuals may “occupy” …) (1987, p. 15). Rather, class is a social relation, argues Gunn. It is the labour-capital, or capital-labour relation. Thus, for Gunn, “class relations just are the social relations … grasped as production relations,” and therefore “class struggle is class itself,” the class relation, in whatever form it takes in capitalist society, and where this antagonism exists throughout capital’s social world (1987, p. 16). It is not capital and class, but capital as class, and class as capital. This is a dynamic, anti-reductionist view of class. Individuals cannot be enclosed in the boxes of bourgeois class theory. This dynamic, capital as class and vice versa, and class as the labour-capital relation, is not external to humanity in capitalist society either: it is “something that runs through us, individually and collectively” (Holloway, 2002, p. 36). Therefore, as: Capital runs through us: we are partially constituted by a social relation that is historically determinate. … [And] within this social relation of the contemporary human, the capital and labour aspects (or poles) of the relation … struggle within us for attention, for support and as bases for action. This is the psychology of capital: the fluid, flowing tension between capital and labour within us. (Rikowski, 2020, p. 15, original emphasis) Marxism must be open, as we are. Class identity, on this basis, means that we take sides with either the capital or labour poles or aspects that run through us. Whichever side we identify with at any particular point rests on the context, the massive heaps of socialisation (including education) that we exist under in the identification, what we perceive as our interests, and any ethical or political principles we hold to heart. Taking sides in this sense, not only means siding For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV 426 Rikowski with one aspect of ourselves against the other, but constitutes a particular form of freedom on the foundations of capital: freedom to identify with one aspect of the capital relation at any time, and in any context. Class identification in this sense can manifest itself through human bodies, as when we stand on picket lines (identification with labour), or when we take trade union leaders to court (and with capital). When police decide to break up a strike or workers’ protest there is identification with capital, even though some of these police might identify with labour when talking things through with family members after a hard day using the baton against heads and firing tear gas. Class as the capital-relation is fluid as between its poles or aspects: “we take part in class struggle on both sides” (Holloway, 2002, p. 36). We choose which side, and when to switch, and how, when and if to keep our real choices and motivations occluded. Aspects of this mélange may not always be clear to us even. Yet despite this fluidity in the class relation, the psychology of capital nevertheless exists as a particular closure of possible human life forms. The capital relation is a locked in, locked down phenomenon with each of the poles, capital and labour, seemingly entwined in an endless antagonism. This conflict runs through all social forms in capitalism, including humankind; the human as a form of capital, that the concept of “human capital” indicates but misrepresents as a positive bourgeois notion, when its negativity (turning humans into forms of capital through education and training) is covered over in human capital theory. Class, therefore, only posits a limited openness; a form of openness that is nevertheless closed, and therefore an element of a Closed Marxism that beckons critique. Some perceive benefits to themselves from class and processes of classifying, and support (with the aid of the capitalist state, media, education and other social institutions) attempts to constrain people into working through relatively fixed roles in commodity production, and: For those who benefit materially from the process of classification (accumulation), it is relatively easy to repress anything which points against or beyond classification, to live within the bounds of fetishism. (Holloway, 2002, p. 37) Anti-capitalism is not “a struggle for the working class,” for to be a member of the working class is a misfortune, argues Bonefeld, after Marx (2014, p. 2). Class is not a positive, affirmative category within capitalism; it becomes positive only within the context of its negation, in a classless society, as something left behind, or in the process of becoming out of social sight. Hence, we come to bury class, not to praise it, and: For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV Marxism and Education 427 Class struggle is therefore not a positive category of a struggle for justice, formal equality, and rights of participation and voice. Rather, class struggle is a negative category. It belongs to a society in which the class tied to work is under compulsion to produce surplus value for the buyer of her labour-power as condition of making a living in competition with all other sellers of labour power on world-market scale. (Bonefeld, 2020, p. 271) We misfit our classed identities, we overflow them, and we are so much more, much richer, than the social boxes that are cast upon us by representatives of capital, and hence they fail to contain us. Class identities, especially “working class” identification, have the effect of strengthening the locks of the capital relation which we seek to break. We may blame greedy capitalists, but this merely “manifests itself as a demand for a better capitalism, one that works in the interests of the class that works” (Bonefeld, 2020, p. 274). The banners of New Improved Capitalisms have multiplied, especially since the Great Recession: “Responsible Capitalism,” “Inclusive Capitalism,” and the like, and they typically have a significant role for education in their projects for rejuvenating capital. Calls for better education for this or that social group and related urgings to change the rules of labour-power development, enhancement and competition inside educational institutions in favour of one group or another, avoid challenging the class relation. Class struggle “is correctly understood as the movement against the existence of social classes” (Bonefeld, 2012, p. 2), not deepening and strengthening capitalist classifications. Nevertheless, attempts by groups within capitalism to better their situation through educational struggle and reform will continue, and are understandable: struggling within capitalism for a better life flows from the class dynamic within us, and is orchestrated through the labour aspect of capitalised humanity. We want to live, we want Life, and we want to live better. We scream at capital and its social forms and at its human representatives and at its multiple inequities, and demand more from it and them. We organise, protest and struggle on the basis of a vast array of human needs, yet, tragically, locking ourselves into labour (against capital) all the more firmly and tragically, even, perhaps especially, if we gain a measure of success in our struggles against the capital aspect embodied in its human representatives. The critique of capital, class and labour goes hand-in-hand with the critique of Marxism itself. The concepts of capital, class and labour are dynamic, constantly changing configurations, intensity and strength, and open up and catalyse new developments. Open Marxism rests on this fluidity and dynamism; Closed Marxism, on the other hand, constructs rigid forms in social thought. Closed Marxism trades in definitions that seek to fix things in thought, fix For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV 428 Rikowski thought as “things,” and solidify their relations in steely inflexibility. Furthermore, if Marxism solidifies into a “school” then it really is in crisis, and that applies to Open Marxism itself, for: Marxism is not in crisis as long as it provokes and produces crises of historically developed “schools” or of Marxists themselves … Metaphorically, Marxism is the theoretical concept of practice and the practical concept of theory which provokes crises of itself as a matter of its inherent strength and validity. (Bonefeld, 1987, p. 37) Critique is a concept-opener on this basis. As John Holloway argues, for Marxist science, critique is not just “criticism” of capitalist society (and Left and Marxist educators give us plenty of that), nor is it some special form of critical thinking. Rather: “Critique is a splitting of the atom, the opening of categories that are closed, to reveal the antagonism within them” (Holloway, 2012, p. 515). For an Open Marxism, this critical opening of categories – such as labour, value, and money – exceeds mere criticism. It moves beyond a commitment to abstract “critical thinking” which becomes entangled in the ether of bourgeois thought. It demystifies, for sure, but it must be ad hominem critique: it must demonstrate how capital’s categories and the phenomena they represent depend on our activity, including our intellectual labour, for in our critiques: We need to go to the core, we need to go ad hominem (as Marx insists). We need to reach an understanding of the category in terms of human action, going through layer after layer of conceptualization if necessary. Why? Because it is only if we understand the social world in terms of human action that we can pose clearly the questions of what human action is necessary to change it. (Holloway, 2012, p. 515) Thus, in exploring how the categories of capital and the phenomena they represent are constructed by us through our activity we are then better positioned to change the repetitive activities that develop, strengthen, sustain and expand capital. Critique should focus on capital’s weak points, as I have argued in a number of papers relating to education crises. Education is implicated in the social production of labour-power in capitalist society. Labour-power is capital’s Achilles’ heel: its use value in capitalist labour processes rests on it being the only commodity that can create value to the extent of yielding surplus value, on which profit and capital’s expansion rest. Labour-power resides within our labouring bodies, is owned by us, and has to be forced, manipulated and incentivised by representatives of capital to yield its alchemical value-creating power. For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV Marxism and Education 429 A further dimension of critique is that it is a form of intellectual attack on capital’s social relations. This relates to another aspect of an Open Marxism: consideration of capitalist social forms. These appear as a web of antagonistic, contradictory phenomena that, in a Closed Marxism, are viewed as encapsulating and enshrouding our lives in a vast set of rigid theoretical boxes connected by conceptual strings. The capital relation exists within these social forms – e.g., value, money – and they are therefore unstable and fragile, despite appearances. Because capital’s social forms are constituted by us in struggle – against the capital aspect of the relation as represented by managers, capitalists and others spurring on and channelling our creative activities – they incorporate the dynamic of the capital relation, which is within us and is expressed in our creations. To see these forms as stable, rigid and finished is to fetishise them and to grant them modes of existence seemingly immune to critique and dissolution. Yet capital’s social forms are always at issue. They are always processes in formation rather than finished social forms (as in Closed Marxism) precisely because of the antagonistic capital relation that is incorporated within them; an unstable relation that we nurture as we labour and stoke the social force of these social forms. Critique as intellectual attack breaks open the fragile integuments of capital’s social forms given delusive substance by Closed Marxist perspectives. When John Holloway explores capital’s social forms he invariably posits value, money and other economic forms as examples. Yet social form analysis and critique can be extended to education. Hence, the following phenomena of education in contemporary capitalism can be subjected to the various aspects of critique as intellectual attack, as noted above: employability, human capital, qualification, learning, study, curriculum, truancy, tests and testing – and many other aspects of the contemporary educational landscape. I have taken this route in my work on commodity forms in education: that is, splitting open these forms to show the antagonistic capital relation contained therein and how we are therefore implicated in developing and sustaining these capitalist forms in education. 5 Open Education This section only makes sense on the basis of two assumptions. Firstly, communism is not some future state of affairs; it exists within capitalist society as a repressed and suppressed form of life that can be advanced and strengthened as alien force within the domain of capital. The practice of communising manifested as episodes of communisation, therefore, is to reassemble aspects within our contemporary existence in order to bring to the fore, to express, this alternative mode of life. To do this is not in any sense prefigurative of a future For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV 430 Rikowski form of life that we might call “communism”; rather it is what Marx called the “real movement” of society, radical alternatives growing out of capitalism, that are against and alien to it. These are moments or episodes of communism as communisation. Secondly, the dyadic capital relation, the antagonistic class relation as labour-capital referred to in the previous section, can be completed as a triadic relation where the third element is the alternative-within, and alien-to, capital. Strengthening this third aspect in contemporary social life comprises the practical and intellectual work of communisation that simultaneously weakens class as the capital relation, and thus class itself within our lives. This also applies to our inner lives, our psychology of capital (Rikowski, 2020). Hence: We have to create alternatives within and alien-to capital: the alt-within and alien-to. Capital must be alienated, “othered” and dissolved within itself. Thus, rather than there being an antagonistic dynamic within personhoods … there is a trinamic – a three-way flowing between the capital aspect, the labour aspect (comprising the capital-labour relation) and alien-to … [And] … it is the practical and intellectual, and above all the collective expressions of the alt-within as alien-to that dissolves the psychology of capital, weakens it as a dynamic within the human in contemporary society. (Rikowski, 2020, pp. 19–20, original emphasis) It is in these “collective expressions” of the alien-to in education that worker co-operative schools, colleges and universities can strengthen the alt-within and begin to dissolve capital. Here is the importance of Mike Neary’s Student as Producer (Neary, 2020): our efforts to create alternative “spaces, social relations and solidaristic support organisations” (Rikowski, 2020, p. 23) within capitalism are consciously set against capital. This is the significance of Neary’s journey from the Reinvention Centre (University of Warwick, 2005–2010); to Student as Producer (University of Lincoln, 2007 – present day); the Social Science Centre (City of Lincoln, 2011–2019); and, with Joss Winn and others, his work for the establishment of a Co-operative University in the UK (2013–present day). Rather than recall the specifics of Neary’s organisational trajectory I will here refer to some principles, theoretical orientations and practical considerations in his Student as Producer, while adding some of my own. These principles point towards what an Open Education might be like when incorporated into a project of dissolving capital and leaving it behind. First, for Neary, pedagogic relations must be opened up by starting out from assuming an “equality of intellects between students and teachers” (Neary, For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV Marxism and Education 431 2020, p. 132), though there is not necessarily equity regarding knowledge or experience as teachers typically have more of these than students. This equality of capacity for understanding allows for the creation of a “new form of social wealth” where the collectively generated “power of knowledge” can emerge in opposition to capital (Neary, 2020, p. 143). Students therefore become producers of knowledge and understanding with their teachers. The second point is that in order for emancipation of intellect and knowledge to be maximised educational encounters should seek to “do nothing that is instrumental for capital” and “this is an important lesson for us all to learn, and the essence of any pedagogy that refers to itself as critical” (Neary, 2020, p. 148). This is an onerous demand, highlighted by the following point. Thirdly, drawing on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875, Neary argues that Money and State as “brutal institutional forms” (2020, p. 123) should be marginalised towards abolition in educational life. Money encloses education through shutting off possibilities, rationing knowledge production and rewarding knowledge – through capitalist markets for labour-power and general commodities – that is socially validated as capital. Capitalist states compress and undermine critical thought, channel education towards capital, and are complicit in reducing education to labour-power production while allowing private operators to reside in educational institutions when opportune. Prospects for “doing nothing that is instrumental for capital” increase as Money and State are marginalised in education. Post-Imaginary Research, research that strains to break the leashes of Money, State and Labour, to be liberated from these tombs, thereby becomes non-instrumental for capital. Fourthly, banishing Money and State invigorates the project of unlearning what Neary calls The Law of Labour and “unleashing the law of life” (Neary, 2020, pp. 10–23). What is the Law of Labour? This law of labour, for Marx, is not benign. Labour is the unavoidable organising principle of capitalist society, imposing a particular way of life, or rather absolute law enforced by the social power of the Police-State and money, poverty and wages, in order to create a particular form of wealth, capitalist value, where people and the planet are the resource not the project (Neary, 2020, p. 21). The law of labour as the “groundwork on which capitalist civilisation is based” must be “undermined if a new form of social life is to be established” (p. 23). This undermining towards dissolution is aided by Marxist science as outlined previously and is put to service in the critique of capitalist educational institutions and forms. There are at least three considerations here. First, categories deriving from mainstream educational thought and research are foci for critique in relation to their entanglement in capitalist social life, especially regarding their relation to the Law of Labour. Secondly, special attention is For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV 432 Rikowski paid to de-classification in its wider sense, as not just an attack on class as the capital relation, but also the undermining of gender, racialised and ethnicised, and other classifications based on differences in human bodies that have power in framing educational trajectories. This is an attack on the legitimacy of representatives of capital to determine educational development for individuals and social groups. Thirdly, alternative educational institutions that exist as forms of attack on State, Money and the Law of Labour are formed through a process of drawing up the substance of communism from within existing capitalist society, creating magical epistemological moments, new forms of wealth and cooperation antithetical to capitalist value and its production, that can be summoned from the depths of capital’s core through educational encounters. These communising moments in education are one aspect of the de-suppression, the liberation of the communist impulse; or, rather, the cooperative and collective forming and intensification of human forces struggling for life within capital’s depths, but which capital relies upon for its existence and development. In this way, communising through education comprises collective acts of drawing forth knowledge, forming and liberating knowledge from the dead soil of capital’s general intellect. 6 Conclusion: An Opening Education We are open, already opened, and opening. Closed Marxism with its soul mate, Closed Education, denies these aspects of human life in contemporary society. Closed Marxism and Education are premised on the value-form of labour, the Law of Labour, and a closing down of educational possibilities in favour of labour-power production, while being impoverished in terms of critiquing and combatting the capitalisation of education – its business takeover. Humans, when representing capital, either practically or intellectually, struggle to attain these closures. Yet as communism exists as the suppressed but necessary substratum of capitalist society, and when class as the capital relation must contend with the alt-within and alien-to capital that flows within us and through capital’s social forms, then these efforts at closure are always provisional, contentious and in need of practical and intellectual reinforcements from capital’s representatives. The gates of closure are always fragile. We make them so, and are socially constituted as gate smashers, with differential recognition as such. Education infused with the spirit of communism and practical communisings that seek to liberate knowledge from capital and create new knowledge for human flourishing always threatens capital. Capital dreads an opening education: the opening of concepts, institutions, social relations, pedagogy, epistemology, For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV Marxism and Education 433 possibilities and visions, cooperative and collective endeavours and many more forms of opening – powered by the forces of critique and Marxist science. Let us open the gates! Dig holes in capital’s muck! Critique the core at the centre of capital’s infernal social universe! Abolish the Law of Labour! Dissolve capital’s educational institutions and create communising alternatives! References Bonefeld, W. (1987). Open marxism. Common Sense: Journal of Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists, 1, 34–37. Bonefeld, W. (2012, December 11). Interview with Werner Bonefeld. Shift Magazine. https://libcom.org/library/interview-werner-bonefeld Bonefeld, W. (2014, January 6). Notes on fetishism, history and uncertainty: Beyond the critique of austerity. Radical Notes. https://radicalnotes.org/2014/01/06/notes-onfetishism-history-and-uncertainty-beyond-the-critique-of-austerity/ Bonefeld, W. (2020). Notes from yesterday: On subversion and the elements of critical reason. In C. Barbagallo, N. Beuret, & D. Harvie (Eds.), Commoning: With George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici (pp. 270–280). Pluto Press. Gunn, R. (1987). Notes on “class.” Common Sense: Journal of Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists, 2(July), 15–25. Holloway, J. (2002). Class and classification: Against, in and beyond labour. In A. Dinerstein & M. Neary (Eds.), The labour debate: An investigation into the theory and reality of capitalist work (pp. 27–40). Ashgate. Holloway, J. (2012). Crisis and critique. Capital & Class, 36(3), 515–519. Liston, D. P. (1988). Faith and evidence: Examining Marxist explanations of schools. American Journal of Education, 96(3), 323–350. https://doi.org/10.1086/443898 Marx, K. (1975). Theories of surplus value (Part 1). Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1978). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. 2). Penguin Books. Neary, M. (2020). Student as producer: How do revolutionary teachers teach? Zero Books. Rikowski, G. (2020). The psychology of capital. In V. Stankovic Pejnović & I. Matić (Eds.), New understanding of capital in the 21st century (pp. 9–31). Institute for Political Studies. Suggested Further Readings/Resources Rikowski, G. (1990, July 25). The recruitment process and labour power [Paper presentation]. Division of Humanities & Modern Languages, Epping Forest College, Loughton, Essex, United Kingdom. https://www.academia.edu/6094032/The_Recruitment_ Process_and_Labour_Power For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV 434 Rikowski Rikowski, G. (2000, September 7–10). That other great class of commodities: Repositioning Marxist educational theory [Conference presentation]. British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Cardiff University, United Kingdom. https://www.academia.edu/6055571/That_Other_Great_Class_of_Commodities_ Repositioning_Marxist_Educational_Theory Rikowski, G. (2002, March 7). Methods for researching the social production of labour power in capitalism [Paper presentation]. School of Education Research Seminar, University College Northampton, United Kingdom. https://www.academia.edu/ 5987884/Methods_for_Researching_the_Social_Production_of_Labour_Power_in_ Capitalism Rikowski, G. (2006). Education and the politics of human resistance. Information for Social Change, 23(Summer). https://www.academia.edu/5997035/Education_and_ the_Politics_of_Human_Resistanc Rikowski, G. (2007, November 9–11). Marxist educational theory unplugged [Conference presentation]. Fourth Historical Materialism Annual Conference, School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom. https://www.academia.edu/6014621/Marxist_Educational_Theory_Unplugged For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV