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 With the contradictions of capitalism heightening and intensifying, and with new social
movements spreading across the globe, revolutionary transformation is once again on the
agenda. For radicals, the most pressing question is: How can we transform ourselves and our
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equally concerned with examining the specific ways in which we can teach, learn, study, and
Corps volunteer educators who have taught at various grade levels, both
struggle ourselves beyond capitalism; how we can ultimately overthrow the existing order
abroad and in the United States, share thought-provoking stories of how
and institute a new mode of production and set of social relations. This incisive and timely
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new and often surprising patterns are created by shifting, juxtaposing and
renewed ‘revolutionary Marxist pedagogy.’ Their careful undertaking of Marx and contemporary scholars
refocusing the multiple lenses within. Shifting the Kaleidoscope should appeal
of Marx situate this text as a must-read across multiple disciplines including philosophy, political science,
to those
government, and readers whotrue
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interested in curriculum studies, multicultural
in the making.”
education,—Sandy Grande, Associate
intercultural Professor
awareness, and Chair,inquiry,
narrative Education post-structuralism,
Department, Connecticut College

international studies, the Peace Corps and/or teaching English abroad.

“This is an essential text for all of those interested in the continuing potential of Marxism as an analytic
tool and as a political movement, with implications for critical pedagogy and a truly liberatory education.
Jonthe
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and social foundations from Oklahoma State University and is currently
—Dennis Carlson, Full Professor, Department of Educational Leadership, Miami University
an enrollment services director and adjunct instructor at Tulsa Community
CurryCollege.
Stephenson Malott (Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction, New Mexico State University) is Assistant
Professor of Educational Foundations in the Department of Professional and Secondary Education at West
Chester University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Malott is a regular contributor to the Journal for Critical Education
Policy www.peterlang.com
Studies.

Derek R. Ford’s (Ph.D. candidate in cultural foundations of education, Syr-

www.peterlang.com

acuse University) professional writing has appeared in Educational Philos-

ophy and Theory; Critical Studies in Education; Policy Futures in Education;
and Studies in Philosophy and Education. He currently teaches in the Social
Justice Studies Program at Hobart & William Smith Colleges.
 Advance Praise for MARX, CAPITAL, and EDUCATION
“This book boldly interrogates the internal contradictions of capital with the aim of
galvanizing a critical pedagogy of becoming, a pedagogy capable of providing the conceptual
and analytic resources necessary to locate and pry open spaces in education from which to
push those contradictions to their breaking point so as to transform capitalism into
communism. The authors patiently explain the dialectical logic of capital’s internal
contradictions that incline capital towards self-negation, paying particular attention to
capital’s compulsive quest for surplus value; they deepen this explanation with an
exploration of Marx’s appropriation of dialectics from Hegel. Setting these explanations in
motion and keeping capital’s thirst for surplus value firmly in view, Malott and Ford confront
and intervene in some of the main debates related to education under capital, including the
relation between educational labor and the reproduction of capitalist social relations, and
the relation between race and class. This book propels forward the revolutionary struggle for
liberation from class society.”
—Deborah P. Kelsh, Professor of Teacher Education, The College of Saint Rose

“Malott and Ford point to the horizon of possibilities that open up when Marx is put back
into Marxism. Their bold advocacy of critical pedagogy as a self-conscious movement towards
communism is a welcome antidote to the bourgeois fluff that has come to pass as ‘critical’ in
education for too long. Marx, Capital, and Education is written by revolutionary educators for
revolutionary educators.”
—Grant Banfield, Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Humanities and Law,
Flinders University, South Australia

“Malott and Ford present a rigorous theoretical framework grounded in the actual practice
of communist movement(s). Their approach to educational pedagogy is a must-read for
anyone with a radical consciousness seriously concerned with not just interpreting, but
changing the world.”
—Eugene Puryear, author of Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration
in Capitalist America; Organizer with the ANSWER Coalition

“Malott and Ford in this exceptional work place capitalism ‘squarely within the crosshairs.’
Vague talk concerning issues of social justice is replaced with concrete explorations of our
present historical moment within the horizon of communism and educators’ place in moving
toward that horizon within a process of a critical pedagogy of becoming. This book will move
critical thinkers toward the horizon. It is about time.”
—William M. Reynolds, Associate Professor of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading, Georgia
Southern University
“Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, world ‘leaders’ continue to directly
and indirectly promote anticommunist disinformation and propaganda. Today one is
casually and smugly dismissed as passé or out of touch if they are still ‘gullible’ enough to
fight for communism. Opposing this relentless capital-centered offensive which depoliticizes
people and intensifies anticonsciousness, Malott and Ford have boldly put communism on
the agenda. With courage, conviction, and serious analysis they show how and why existing
political-economic arrangements can and must be replaced by a human-centered society and
economic system, a world free of exploitation, alienated relations, and the division between
mental and manual labor. To this end, the authors skillfully sketch the organic connections
between critical pedagogy, transformation, and Marxist and Hegelian dialectics in order to
advance ‘a pedagogy of becoming.’ Here the future lies within the present and negation is
affirmation. But Malott and Ford remind us at every turn that this does not mean that
phenomena unfold deterministically.”
—Shawgi Tell, Associate Professor of Education, Department of Social
and Psychological Foundations of Education, Nazareth College

“This book is a weapon to be used not merely against capital, but in the revolutionary struggle
to overthrow capitalism and realize a communist future that enables the becoming of
humanity. In an era in which Marxist educational theorizing is making a comeback, Malott
and Ford represent the best of a new generation of revolutionary thinkers who do not settle
for merely interesting academic inquiry, but rather illustrate how deep intellectual inquiry
can inform answers to questions about how we can teach, learn, and take action in the
construction of a proletarian offensive in the global class war. Malott and Ford
unapologetically embrace the goal of creating a new set of social relations that enable the
absolute movement of becoming, that is communism. They put capitalism in the crosshairs
and refuse to take cover under the empty shells that democracy, social justice, or
domesticated critical pedagogy have become. Instead they return to Marx, offering crystal
clear theoretical and practical responses to questions at the heart of conversations about how
we can create not only new pedagogies, but a new world, free from the scourge of capitalism.”
—E. Wayne Ross, Professor, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia

“This is a hugely important and impressive book by…two increasingly influential

revolutionary Marxist theorists/activists. They assert and closely argue that ‘in order for
education to contribute to the generation of a counterpower it has to place capital squarely
in its crosshairs.’ They open up the field of possibilities for revolutionary education, enabling
the imagination of ‘a world without the exploitation and oppression that characterizes
capital.’ This book is hard-hitting and uncompromising. It is scholarly. It is activist. It is a
remarkable addition to contemporary critical education and Marxist theory.”
—Dave Hill, Professor of Education Research, Anglia Ruskin University, England;
Chief Editor of the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies;
Co-founder and Co-organizer of the annual International Conference on Critical Education
 MARX,
CAPITAL,
and EDUCATION
 Narrative, Dialogue,
and the Political
Production of Meaning
Michael Peters & Peter McLaren
Series Editors
Vol. 5

The Education and Struggle series is part of the Peter Lang Education list.
Every volume is peer reviewed and meets
the highest quality standards for content and production

PETER LANG
New York  Bern  Frankfurt  Berlin
Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw
Curry Stephenson Malott and Derek R. Ford

MARX,
CAPITAL,
and EDUCATION

Towards a Critical Pedagogy

of Becoming

PETER LANG
New York  Bern  Frankfurt  Berlin
Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Malott, Curry Stephenson.
Marx, capital, and education: towards a critical pedagogy of becoming /
Curry Stephenson Malott, Derek R. Ford.
pages cm. — (Education and Struggle: Narrative, Dialogue
and the Political Production of Meaning; v. 5)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Critical pedagogy. 2. Capitalism and education.
3. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. I. Ford, Derek R. II. Title.
LC196.M22 370.11’5—dc23 2015009636
ISBN 978-1-4331-3112-7 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4331-3111-0 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4539-1602-5 (e-book)
ISSN 2168-6432

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

Cover art: “Cracked Grid” by Sarah Pfohl

© 2015 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
This book is dedicated to all of the proletarian teachers, students,
and fighters in the global class war.
 c ontents

Foreword. Being and Becoming Communist:

Toward a Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy of Becoming ix
Peter McLaren
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 1

Chapter 1. Becoming through Negation: Revisiting Marx’s Humanism 13

Chapter 2. From Revolution to Counterrevolution and Back
Again? The Global Class War and Becoming Communist 39
Chapter 3. Becoming Communist in the Global Class War: Centering
the Critique of the Gotha Programme 63
Chapter 4. The “Cynical Recklessness” of Capital: Machinery,
Becoming, and Revolutionary Marxist Social
Studies Education 93
Chapter 5. Teaching Ferguson, Teaching Capital: Slavery and the
“Terrorist Energy” of Capital 117
viii contents

Chapter 6. Connecting “Economic Bondage” to “Personified

Capital”: Another Step toward a Critical
Pedagogy of Becoming 137

Epilogue: Negate the Present! 153

References 157
Index 163
 foreword

being and becoming communist :

toward a revolutionary critical
pedagogy of becoming
peter m claren

Is communism the indisputable and irrevocable horizon of the present histor-

ical juncture? This question is of grave discernment for humanity. Marx, Cap-
ital, and Education represents an extended and exhilarating exegetical “yes” to
this question.
The political trajectory of this book alone should explode the mainstream
debate over education into a frenzy of contradictions, omissions, and analytic
paralyses, sending shards of hope flying through the air like Fourth of July
bottle rockets whistling The Internationale. But honesty demands that we ask:
What fate will such a book truly enjoy in a field in which critical pedagogy
continues to be burdened by the scars of its compliance with the neoliberal
academy and where tinkering with capitalism underwrites the ne plus ultra
defiant act of the critical pedagogue? This is an especially important question
in a world in which capitalism remains synonymous with democracy, and the
struggles for democracy effectively mean democracy for the capitalist class
alone. In the short run, Marx, Capital, and Education will obviously both po-
larize and mobilize. It will polarize the left, provoking the majority of liberal
and left liberals to run shrieking from its essential premises and to take refuge
on the wrong side of the ramparts (which is almost always the side populated
x marx, capital, and education

with the best of intentions and the most highbrow of qualifications). As soon
as readers learn that the authors are unrepentant “communists,” they will ear-
mark the book for the office dustbin or for the bonfire at the next church
retreat, after the Bible trivia games and the speed-dating event for the parish
singles. Or else they will blame the book when they rush out of the prayer
tent screaming after being bitten by the yellow timber rattlesnake they were
handling during the service.
Ignoring Marx, Capital, and Education because of its communist founda-
tions comes at a price, the least of which is forfeiting an important oppor-
tunity to learn what it takes to be a transformative educational warrior in
a global war. In rejecting a priori the book’s critiques and strategies for the
revolutionary transformation of our planet, a reluctant public will impotently
stand by in frozen disdain and under pain of remaining oblivious to what is
most specifically human about us, only prolonging the agony of the wretched
of the earth. Here, as is too often the case, a formidable indifference to the
suffering of others will form the blackest residue of our being.
I have been an educator since 1974, and during the ensuing years up to
the present, I have rarely encountered an educational book like Marx, Capi-
tal, and Education that speaks so clearly and potently the truth about what it
will take to bring justice to the immiserated of this world. Marx, Capital, and
Education will be a terribly uncomfortable book for most educators to read
because the mass media and the rest of the ideological state apparatuses will
have already predisposed them to reject it outright, probably within the first
few pages.
Education is a decidedly conservative field, after all, and even those few
truly radical philosophical and theoretical books that have made it onto the
library shelves of colleges of education—Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed im-
mediately comes to mind—have been politically domesticated in the process
of bringing such works to bear on the actual service of teaching. Freire’s ideas
have been uprooted from their soil in working-class communities and repot-
ted in reading lists in graduate schools more for decoration than for substance,
like the glass terrarium orchid vases that brighten up the exposed brick walls
of urban lofts. Transformed into luxurious discursive amenities for conver-
sations taking place in graduate seminars and student lounges, these ideas
eventually become refunctioned in the service of student embourgeoisement.
Academic careers in the United States depend upon a reflex demonization
of Marx for many reasons, not least of which has to due with the fact that,
when scrutinized under a Marxist optic, the work of many scholars is revealed
 foreword xi

to be as porous as the cell membranes of the Wicked Witch of the West, who
melted into oblivion on contact with water in The Wizard of Oz. Hence, most
attacks on Marx come from a dismissal of his work as an example of economic
reductionism or teleological theorizing, from the claim that his writings pre-
figure the historical inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat or that
all alienation will cease as soon as factories collectivize. While some critical
educators give ground for the reproach of being against Marxism, this attitude
is due more to an incomplete understanding of Marx than of boasting a great-
er sociological understanding than the old bearded devil himself. These critics
frequently make their claims while ignoring Marx’s own writings and avoiding
works that have already been written by Marxists that have already addressed
these issues and put them to rest.
To write a book such as Marx, Capital, and Education requires courage and
steadfastness to the cause of liberation, especially during these unholy times of
national security corporate capitalism that has begotten the national security
state. Likely, the book will be featured prominently on the review lists of left
academic journals eager to bring a Marxist optic to the field of education, of
which this book clearly ranks among the most pathfinding and important,
and this will be a good thing. But this is a book that demands to be read and
rigorously digested not only by professional intellectuals but by teachers who
work in institutions ranging from kindergartens to universities and by radical
organizers. Hence, the importance of getting this book into the hands of as
many educators and activists as possible as quickly as possible.
In my own educational life, it took me many years to grasp and to be
comfortable with the positions taken in Marx, Capital, and Education. As a
former comparative symbologist with a penchant for what I called a “critical
postmodernism,” there were many theoretical and political hurdles that were
necessary for me to overcome in order to be able to put forward positions
in my post–1995 work similar to or compatible with those of Malott and
Ford. First and foremost, I needed to engage in the original works of Marx
and Marxist scholars while developing a thorough understanding of the ar-
guments made by Marx’s defenders and critics; second, I needed to be able to
understand Marx’s contribution to a critique of political economy when read
against the prevailing trends in philosophy, social theory, political science,
and economics, including their postmodern and neoliberal variants; and
third, I needed to be able to weigh Marxist critiques of education against cri-
tiques employing other theoretical and philosophical trajectories. The point
that I am trying to make is that engaging Marx, Capital, and Education by the
xii marx, capital, and education

rank-and-file educator will require a steadfast commitment to undertaking a

long and difficult journey of discovery. This is a journey that I believe is abso-
lutely necessary if humanity is not to sink into a barbarism the likes of which
we are loath today to contemplate, simply because the image we are likely to
conjure will be worse than all the ravages of historical wars of empire com-
bined. Reading this book will serve as an important and necessary conceptual
catapult in helping us to contemplate our being-in-the world as activist pro-
tagonistic agents, to grasp the nature of what it means to be human, and to
reveal precisely what our normalized and normalizing approaches to everyday
life are meant to conceal.
I opened this preface by saying that I believe this book will both polarize
and mobilize. How, then, will it mobilize readers? In its brilliant adumbration
of neoliberalism as a counterrevolutionary strategy within capitalism and its
perceptive attribution of liberation to the realization of a communist society,
it will immediately have the effect of assisting radical left educators who have
already committed themselves to a Marxist analysis in their various efforts
to mobilize communities against corporate efforts to privatize education and
transform education into a subsector of the economy. But I believe it will have
an even larger and more enthusiastic audience outside the United States and
that once its international influence is felt, it will then be reengaged enthusi-
astically by larger and growing numbers of educators in the United States as
a means of rerooting Marxism here among U.S. educators. Hence, I believe
there should be efforts made to have this book translated into as many lan-
guages as possible as soon as possible.
Students in colleges of education are not that much different from stu-
dents in other fields: they seek secure employment, they want to raise families
and contribute to society, and they want to enjoy the fruits of their hard work.
Admittedly, most of them don’t want to be overwhelmed by world events
or engaging in the arduous work necessary to acquire the skill sets that will
enable them to read the word and the world with a critical eye toward the
suffering masses of humanity, the ranks of which are expanding exponentially
with each passing decade. Everyday life—raising a family, holding down a job,
keeping oneself and one’s loved ones healthy—is a daunting enough chal-
lenge without having to carry an additional burden of research and analysis,
let alone engage in international proletarian struggle. Yet the consequences
of not engaging in such a struggle are growing direr with each and every pass-
ing day. We cannot afford not to engage in such a struggle since the future of
humanity depends upon us, upon all of us. There is no more room for dispute
 foreword xiii

between capitalists and wage earners. There is only room for action. Hence
the book Marx, Capital, and Education.
In the remaining space of the preface, I want to summarize what I believe
to be some distinguishing characteristics of this book and why it ranks, in my
mind, among the best books on Marx and education to date, if not the best.
And why I believe that this book can serve to reroute Marxist theory into
critical pedagogy and education more generally.
Marx, Capital, and Education removes itself from generic conventions in
the Marxist educational literature that precedes it. Whereas many books on
education attempting to conscript Marx into the service of educational re-
form point to a socialist or democratic alternative to capitalism, Malott and
Ford mince no words about the importance of a communist destination for
humanity. They make no bones about the fact that this is a book written by
two radical educators, two communist intellectual activists who share little
affinity with the haute-bourgeois intellectuals who have made careers out of
criticizing critical pedagogy. They have written this book for the sole purpose
of furthering the international proletarian struggle. Because the Soviet Union
and the Eastern Bloc states are now caricatured as totalitarian dictatorships,
and because Marx is judged, in turn, to be ipso facto a dangerous demagogue
as a result of these perceptions, Malott and Ford certainly have their work cut
out for them.
Malott and Ford describe communism, after Marx, as the “absolute mo-
ment of becoming.” As historical materialists, they see education in this con-
text as cultivating the process of becoming more fully human and assert that
communism is the only viable alternative for achieving such a goal. What is
so crucially important about this book is that Malott and Ford articulate a hu-
manism that opens up rather than closes down the corpus of writings by Marx.
First, unlike many post-Marxists, they do not reject the ontological category
of the subject itself. They perceive revolutionary subjectivity to be immanent
in the very structure of capital that it aims to revolutionize. Second, while
they realize that there may never be a fully resolutive form of the social, they
remain undaunted in their strategic priority of engaging in a protracted class
struggle. Third, by taking an objectivist position, they do not reject the idea
that society can be considered an immanent totality and that there are imma-
nent tendencies to capitalist development that necessitate a particular form
of revolutionary subjectivity that privileges the working class. And last, they
do not retreat from the idea that history has a subject and that the proletariat
has a special relationship to progressive politics.
xiv marx, capital, and education

These facts alone will make it difficult for liberals and left liberals to join
in support for the kind of orthopraxis called for in this book. Left liberals stop
short in advocating for the destruction of capitalism and instead call for the
restoration of the primacy of labor over capital, workers’ self-management,
direct democracy, social welfare initiatives, management/labor alliances,
housing cooperatives for the poor as an antidote to gentrification, effective
investment programs, disinvestment, corporate responsibility, an end to the
oligopolistic price fixing of multinational corporations, and so forth. While
these approaches are good in themselves, they lack a broader vision that in-
corporates the necessity of moving beyond value production. Malott and Ford
do not reject left liberal proposals such as these; they rather put them into a
dialectical perspective. Since dialectics is about mediation and not the jux-
taposition of binary oppositions, they see left liberal efforts at reform as im-
portant but limited when read against Marx’s revolutionary call to transcend
value production by building a communist future. In other words, it is not a
question of “either reform or revolution” but rather “both reform and revolu-
tion.” Yet it is important to stress that Malott and Ford put their fundamental
emphasis on revolution. And that is what truly distinguishes their work from
that of so many other left educational scholars, including many Marxists and
neo-Marxists.
The authors write that the “necessary opulent consumption patterns of the
simultaneously real and symbolic 1 percent situated next to the growing global
immiseration of the vast majority increasingly reveals something inherently de-
structive and degrading about the process of creating and perpetually expanding
capital.” What it reveals, of course, is the logic of capital, a logic which the au-
thors describe as “the very substance of capital’s DNA, and it therefore cannot
be reformed out of capital.” So we don’t need a genetically modified capitalism;
what we need is a new gene pool of freely associated producers.
The authors address many pressing issues, including problematizing do-
mestic and international colonized lands and the legacy of U.S. imperialism.
Through this book, they push forward struggles against police brutality and
murder, racism, sexism, patriarchy, and homophobia, connecting these strug-
gles to economic bondage and to what they refer to, after Marx, as “personified
capital,” or the fashioning of bourgeois subjectivity. They incorporate into edu-
cational theory the framework of national oppression as a base for such organiz-
ing. Examining the means whereby the laws of commodity production (i.e., the
exchange of equivalents) developed into the laws of capitalist accumulation,
they uncover the myriad ways today in which these laws become ideologically
 foreword xv

mystified and, in so doing, uncover the “terrorist energy” identified by Marx

that powers the dark engines of capital. More specific to the question of educa-
tion, they reveal that “educational labor has a similar effect on the student as
the machine has on the production of products,” resulting in the creation of a
class of passive dependents with no means to reproduce their existence outside
of exchanging the value of their labor-power for a wage. They lucidly lay bare
the hidden mechanisms of capitalist production relations as part of the peda-
gogical process of fostering revolutionary subjectivities antagonistic to capital.
Malott and Ford have undressed the educational formulae exercised by a
neoliberal capitalism that has dramatically shifted investment from produc-
tive capital to money capital and that the authors argue must be deracinated:

Financialization creates the appearance of growth, which may have no material basis.
Rising profits in the financial sector do not necessarily come from real growth, but
the plundering of public resources. In their quest for new markets and new sources
of profit in an increasingly technicized world, the public sector has been a major
target for hungry investors desperate to set capitals in motion to engage the process
of expansion and accumulation. One strategy plays out something like this: taxes are
reduced on the capitalist class; education is cut as state coffers dry up; the quality of
said programs therefore becomes degraded; the public is thus more easily convinced
that the problem with education, ironically, is that it lacks competition; privatization
is proffered as the only solution.

Malott and Ford argue convincingly that the lineaments of the contem-
porary class struggle are best grasped through a historical examination of the
global class war, and they utilize a framework developed by Sam Marcy in the
1950s that they persuasively argue “is more expansive and accurate than ‘neo-
liberalism,’ since it focuses on a conceptualization of global capitalist class
strategy.” This is an enormously timely and unique contribution to the field.
While Hollywood has glamorized the rotting corpse of industrial capi-
tal by rotating it toward a neo-Victorian steampunk postmodernism, layering
the ruins of economic bondage with retro-futuristic fashions, architectures,
and machines—effectively putting red leather goggles with brass fittings
and leather shoulder and elbow armor decorated with clock parts on Marx’s
corpse—Malott and Ford do not succumb to theoretical fashion, even to ad-
mit that they are old fashioned. And given that scholars today have not yet
caught up to Marx, they are old fashioned and at the same time decidedly
ahead of their time. The result is a brilliant model of critical pedagogy based
on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and the work of Engels on the role
of the state. As the authors proclaim:
xvi marx, capital, and education

The austerity measures ravaging much of the world make the most sense in the con-
text of Engels’s notion of the state as a “capitalist machine.” The No Child Left
Behind Act, Race to the Top, and the War on Terror in the United States are ob-
vious products of this machine. Such insights challenge the rallying cries in critical
pedagogy for saving public education from the neoliberal era’s movement to privatize
the welfare state by challenging the state itself as a mechanism and tool of capital.
While public spaces tend to offer more room for creative critical pedagogies and, it
might be argued, are therefore worth saving, today’s capitalism cannot return to that
of previous eras. What is more, the extreme right-wing political parties argue that
public education is socialism and therefore must be freed from this monopoly so the
most competitive products can rise to their market-determined place of superiority,
allowing inferior competitors (i.e., schools) to perish. In this context, fighting for
public education is a progressive position. For Marx, the state should fund education
but have no control over its purpose or curriculum.

It is true, the authors warn, that critical pedagogy has for too long sojourned
at the level of epistemology, and this must cease. And since we can’t regulate
capitalism out of existence, they propose an alternative that takes into ac-
count the social totality:

In stark contrast to mainstream, domesticated currents that put critical pedagogy

forward as a method of teaching and learning, we insist that critical pedagogy is part
of a movement toward the radical transformation of the totality of social relations,
which entails the abolition of capitalism and private-property–based social relations.
This means—and this point is absolutely crucial—that our critical pedagogy is only
interested in combating neoliberalism because neoliberalism is the current configu-
ration of capitalism and the capital relation today. We are not interested in fighting
neoliberal privatizations in the name of a kinder, gentler capitalism (which is always
only kinder and gentler for some, of course). Or, more strategically speaking, we are
interested in fighting neoliberalism insofar as that fight allows us to lay bare the fun-
damental logic of capital upon which it rests.

There is an urgency about the development of a critical pedagogy of becoming

that follows this book onto every page and haunts our pedagogical imaginary.
It can be best summarized in the authors’ own words:

This pedagogy of becoming is therefore not a casual call to action but comes with
a sense of urgency that is not possible to exaggerate or overstate. Consequently, we
might say that this critical pedagogy of becoming is intended to represent a rebel-
lion in education. That is, this critical pedagogy is informed by the same insights
informing Marx’s hypothetical wage-workers, who uncover and become conscious of
the fact that “wages are not what they appear to be, namely, the value, or price, of labor,
but only a masked form for the value, or price, of labor power,” and, as a result, develop
 foreword xvii

a full understanding of capitalism and become socialist organizers. Put another way,
we might say that the goal of a Marxist critical pedagogy is to facilitate a class- and
self-consciousness within students and teachers similar to that of the “…slaves who
have at last got behind the secret of slavery and broken out in rebellion” (p. 15)…
this critical pedagogy is so out of fashion at the present moment in the larger main-
stream critical pedagogy community at the center of the capitalist power base, the
United States, that Marxist educators often relate to Marx’s dismay of how many
socialists prescribed to the limited analysis showcased within the Gotha Programme.

The authors recognize that since Marxism does not examine historical
realities irrespective of their specific contexts, Marx’s works cannot be fixed
in place and time or set in stone; in other words, Marxist theory serves as a
means of bringing to light revolutionizing possibilities and potentialities from
ever-shifting social realities and geopolitical contingencies. Marx did not su-
persede philosophy in favor of economic or political theory. To understand
the relative expansion of capital in recurrently reshaping the globe as a series
of geospacial investments and disinvestments requires that we understand the
laws of tendency of capitalist production and the hegemonizing influence of
education and work themselves. But it also demands that we acquire a phi-
losophy of praxis. We can’t transcend capitalism without first understanding
its anatomy, its history, its evolutionary capacities. And understanding is a
decidedly dialectical process, teasing out the internal relations of everyday life
and the totality of social relations that inform it.
Critical pedagogy is a conduit to the universal on the part of the oppressed
who work from their particular subjective formations and localities of struggle
to transform the real, objective conditions of people’s lives in the service of
a nonalienated humanity engaged in freely associated labor. The authors de-
scribe it thusly as “nonalienated humanity freely engaged in a planned, collective
effort to reproduce social existence.” They go on to write:

The Marxist dialectic allows us to understand that the potential to be free—to re-
unite thinking and doing—already exists within the alienated wageworker, from the
privileged engineers and managers to the more oppressed manual laborers. Those of
us who rely on a wage to survive are therefore contradictory—we embody our own
potential negation as dehumanized existence because our vital powers, our human-
ness, are externally commanded and controlled.

The authors seek a social universe beyond value production, where we

assimilate the tangible world as it assimilates us; where we are formed by
the totality of the world in the search to meet the needs of our collective
xviii marx, capital, and education

humanity; where the search for justice and our obligation to do justice become
one and the same. This book should be read by all but especially those who
are dependent wage laborers, those who have no other option but to sell their
own labor-power for a price in order to obtain the use-values they need to
reproduce themselves and the next generation of working-class laborers, la-
borers who will recursively toil for the capitalists, generation after generation,
for the foreseeable future. But the future is becoming less and less foreseeable.
To see the future and to struggle side by side for our existence demands that we
recreate the future through our struggle. This requires that we follow Malott
and Ford and go to the very limits of our humanity, that we plumb the abyss of
the possible, and that we set ourselves upon the road of uncertainty to blaze a
new communist trail into the unknown.
 acknowledgments

Together we would first and foremost like to thank Peter McLaren for the rich
body of Marxist critical pedagogy he has painstakingly produced, lived, and
advocated for that gave inspiration and valuable insight into Marx, Capital,
and Education. However odd it may seem, we must also thank Marx himself
for the personal sacrifices he made expending his life’s labor on charting the
contours and trajectories of the capitalist mode of production, making ped-
agogical works like this possible. We are very grateful to Michael Peters and
Peter McLaren for including this book in their cutting-edge Peter Lang series,
Education and Struggle. Thanks also to Dave Hill, Brad Porfilio, and Colin
Jenkins for publishing earlier versions of Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5 in the Jour-
nal for Critical Education Policy Studies, The SoJo Journal, and The Hampton
Institute. We would like to thank Chris Myers for generously facilitating the
publication of this manuscript. Finally, we thank all of the workers helping to
produce and distribute this book.
Curry would like to thank his wife, Donna, for her love, support, and
feedback through the never-ending research and writing process. He would
like to acknowledge his children, Jayne and Logan, for bringing true joy and
hope to an otherwise intolerable bourgeois society. Curry would also like to
thank his mother, Sally, his Aunt Sue, his sisters, Hannah and Kristen, all of
xx marx, capital, and education

his many cousins, nieces, aunts, uncles and family members for his foundation
and grounding. A deep thanks are due to Derek for his unflinching and un-
yielding communist contributions and collaboration; he is a true inspiration
and leader in this project of becoming. Many thanks are also due to the West
Chester University of Pennsylvania learning community, one of the last plac-
es to contribute to critical pedagogy, being a publicly owned university. Curry
also wants to express his deep respect and appreciation for all of his APSCUF
(Association of Pennsylvania State College & University Faculties) comrades
across the state of Pennsylvania. Finally, Curry would like to express his un-
compromising solidarity with the critical pedagogy community the world over.
Derek would like to acknowledge his parents, Janet and Bob, and his
grandmother, Beverly, for their unwavering support and encouragement. He
would like to thank Curry for his comradeship, discipline, unbounded energy,
and willingness to collaborate on this project. His advisor, Barbara Apple-
baum, continues to provide crucial guidance, and his fellow graduate students
in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University have provided a
stimulating atmosphere, so thanks to Dave Wolken, Kelsey John, Mike Fraser,
and Laura Jaffee. Many of the ideas presented in the book were born from
struggling alongside his comrades in the ANSWER Coalition, THE General
Body, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Revolutionary Communist Group,
and global anti-imperialist movements more generally (Collin Chambers,
Michael Kowalchuk, Maddie Horrell, Sarah Sloan, Richard Becker, Eugene
Puryear, Brian Becker, Navid Nasr, Lizzie Phelan, Reverend Dexter, Marcel
Cartier, Danny Shaw, Andrew Castro, and Carlos Martinez, to name a few).
Sarah Pfohl’s intellectual and pedagogical genius has proved infinitely influ-
ential over the last few years. Finally, he couldn’t imagine doing any of this
without his companion species, Felix.
 introduction

“With communism as our horizon, the field of possibilities for revolutionary theory
and practice starts to change shape. Barriers to action fall away. New potentials and
challenges come to the fore. Anything is possible.”
— jodi dean

Education is, by definition, a transformative process. When one enters into

an educational engagement—knowingly or unknowingly—one is necessarily
changed in some way. At the very least, the information that one knows is
altered in some form or manner. At the other extreme, and still at the level
of the individual, one’s very subjectivity is reconstituted. The stakes become
even greater when we look at education at the scale of society. Indeed, to say
that education has the power to transform society or the world borders on the
mundane. We would be hard pressed, for example, to name one contemporary
leading political figure that did not resort to such clichés. Yet our problem
with such proclamations is not that they are banal but that they are com-
pletely devoid of direction. The content, nature and, most importantly, the
direction and potentiality of this transformation are completely immaterial to
education itself. In other words, yes, education can change people and societies,
but how and—just as importantly—toward what ends?1
2 marx, capital, and education

It is these questions in which this book intervenes. We are, to be sure, not

merely concerned with raising and exploring these questions because they are
interesting or provide for good academic inquiry. We are concerned rather
with beginning to answer them, and we pursue this task in an unapologetically
partisan manner. That is, we are most interested in investigating the move-
ment toward communism and the role that critical pedagogy can play in this
transition. A large part of this endeavor entails a critical understanding of the
past and the present, an excavation of the underlying logics and often-opaque
forces that have—and continue to—determine the world-historic context in
which we find ourselves, and out of which we struggle to teach, learn, study,
and act ourselves. As any good militant knows, a proper grasp of the historical
and contemporary contours of life is paramount to formulating and enacting
courses of action and forms of organization that effectively contribute to the
production of counterpower. Possible futures, after all, do not materialize out
of nowhere; they are always only immanent in the present.
Even more than being vacuous, to call for change and transformation
from within capitalism can be, in a strange way, to call for more of the same.
This is so because capitalism is an incredibly dynamic system that must always
be in motion. When, for example, the circulation of a particular commodity
ceases for whatever reason, that commodity becomes literally valueless. It is
for this reason that there is nothing so traumatizing for a merchant capitalist
as a warehouse full of commodities with nowhere to go or for a money capital-
ist as a bank with no deposits or withdrawals or for a productive capitalist as a
machine or worker sitting idle. Capitalism is defined by rapid motion, by the
permanent “revolutionising [of] the instruments of production, and thereby
the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society”
(Marx and Engels, 1848/1972, p. 476).
This perpetual process of transformation has produced us as subjects
who not only are open to change, but actually demand it. Marshall Berman
(1982/1988) writes about this phenomenon, noting that “for people, whatev-
er their class, to survive in modern society, their personalities must take on
the fluid and open form of this society” (p. 95). However, if people are used
to—and indeed desire—constant change, then how can they be expected to
endlessly conform to the roles assigned to them by bourgeois society? Here
we encounter a limit that capitalism must continually negotiate, and the way
in which this limit has most effectively been managed has been to produce a
circumscribed field of the possible. Nearly anything goes so long as the polit-
ical-economic order based on the rule of private property goes unchallenged.
 introduction 3

In order for education to contribute to the generation of a counterpower,

it has to place capital squarely in its crosshairs. More than that, it has to open
up the field of possibilities, enabling the imagination of a world without the
exploitation and oppression that characterizes capital. The reader will there-
fore not find any vague talk in this book about “inclusion,” “making society
more just,” “expanding or reclaiming the public sphere,” or “restraining domi-
nant power.” In fact, one will not even read of “democracy.” While we are not
opposed to any of the former terms, in an effort to contribute to the tearing
open of the field of the possible beyond the limits imposed on it by bourgeois
forms of thought, we write about communism. In doing so, we join a growing
chorus of voices on the Left who have begun to mobilize our insurgent outrage
and desire under the banner of communism.
Communism, for us, best captures the simultaneously beautiful and tragic,
inspiring and frustrating history of the international proletarian struggle
that we inherit and inhabit. We cannot divorce ourselves from the course of
the actually existing workers’ struggle as it has undulated, particularly since
its eruption on the world scene with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. To
attempt to divorce ourselves from this lineage would be to withdraw from
politics altogether and forfeit the possibility of moving beyond capitalism;
communism remains the alternative to capitalism. To be sure, we inhabit this
history critically, acknowledging its victories and accomplishments as well as
its tragedies and errors. But we make no apologies.
Out of all of the radical scholars that have returned to communism in
the last decade, Jodi Dean’s (2012) theorization of communism as a “horizon”
is particularly helpful for framing contemporary political struggles. A hori-
zon announces an absolute division. The earth’s horizon, for example, sepa-
rates off those lines of visibility that converge with the ground and those that
dissipate into the sky. The communist horizon is thus the political division
in which we are constituted; it “impresses upon us the necessity to abolish
capitalism and to create global practices and institutions of egalitarian coop-
eration” (p. 6). Importantly, Dean’s (2012) use of the term “communism” is
not synonymous with “democracy,” as it is for others, like Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri. Communism, in its insistence on division, stands opposed to
democracy, which “avoids the fundamental antagonism between the 1 per-
cent and the rest of us by acting as if the only thing really missing was partic-
ipation” (pp. 57–58).
All of this is well and good, it might be objected, but does it really
make strategic sense to call ourselves communists now, given the history of
4 marx, capital, and education

anti-communism in the U.S. and its absolute conflation with “totalitarianism”

or “authoritarianism?” We have several responses to this. The first response is
that revolutions are not popularity contests, and appeals to what is popular
result in the sacrificing of principles and concessions to bourgeois ideology.
Thus, when we make excuses for being communists, or when we instead refer
to ourselves as “radical democrats” or some other platitude, we actually work
to reinforce anti-worker ideology and obscure the class struggle. Further, we
assume in advance that we are only talking to a select group of people. For
masses of workers and oppressed people across the globe, communism does
not conjure up images of uniformity, dullness, and rationality but of interna-
tional solidarity and victorious anti-colonial liberation struggles. The second
response is that recent protests, insurrections, and revolutions across the globe
have placed communism back on the table as not only a viable but, moreover,
a desirable alternative to the injustice and exploitation that define neoliberal
capitalism (and capitalism more generally). The third response is that, even
if we were to take all of the negative (and mostly incorrect) associations that
people have with communism, these would still pale in comparison to the
astonishing violence and genocides carried out in the name of democracy.
Rather than shying away from the term “communism” and taking cover in
democracy, we confront head-on the ideological distortions that have perme-
ated U.S. society and other capitalist democracies.
Communism, of course, is not some objective, static state. Quite the op-
posite. In fact, at one point in his Grundrisse notebooks, Marx (1939/1973)
writes that communism is “the absolute movement of becoming” (p. 488).
This movement of becoming dialectically links the subjective and the objec-
tive, and it is in this way that we focus on education as a process of becoming.
In other words, the critical pedagogy that we develop in the following pages
recognizes both that subjectivity takes shape within—and as a result of—the
totality of capital and that it is, in the last instance, subjects that push against
and, hopefully, beyond that totality. As such, the ways in which we under-
stand ourselves and our world are of the utmost importance. As an example,
one would be extremely hard pressed to find someone who does not know
another, or at least has heard of another, who is struggling financially because
of what are perceived to be bad life choices, such as dropping out of school;
having too many children at too young an age; over spending beyond one’s
means; making unwise decisions regarding one’s romantic life; being an in-
subordinate employee and getting fired; abusing drugs and alcohol; etc. With
a psychologized and decontextualized dominant bourgeois ideology in place,
 introduction 5

it is not hard to convince working people to view our own poverty as the
product of irresponsible behavior rather than a consequence of the historical
development of capital and its internal logic that is mediated through the
agency of antagonistic social classes. We need a critical pedagogy that can
help us discern the processes at work below the surface of poverty, the un-
derlying structures and forces that coordinate our lives; one that, in so doing,
transforms not only our consciousness but our very being.
The task of the critical educator, then, is to understand the present de-
terminations of our time, to begin to imagine and orient ourselves toward the
communist future, and propose and engage in a process by which we might
become into that future. As teachers, organizers, and activists, we are prin-
cipally concerned with the ways in which education is a central component
in the reproduction of exploitation and oppression and the ways in which it
can become central to the communist struggle and a communist future. In
exploring this question, we have drawn heavily upon revolutionary critical
pedagogy—which is something of a synthesis of critical pedagogy and Marxist
educational theory—and especially the work of Peter McLaren. Due in no
small part to the heightening of contradictions of global capital—expressed
succinctly in the rhetoric of the 1% versus the 99%—there has been a renewed
interest in both Marxist educational theory and critical pedagogy. What is
most politically promising for revolutionary educators in this renewal is the
potential to bridge the two fields. This is particularly important for critical
pedagogy, as this field has gradually become domesticated within academic
institutions and teacher training programs, being reduced to a “method” of
dialogue or an approach to navigating the teacher-student relationship. The
conversation is also important for Marxist educational theory, because criti-
cal pedagogy places particular emphasis on the ways in which classrooms and
schools relate to, impact, and are determined by broader social and political
forces.
As a body of literature and praxis, critical pedagogy has historically been
oriented toward intervening in and transforming exploitative and oppressive
social relations. Early iterations of critical pedagogy, such as the one articu-
lated in Henry Giroux’s (1983) classic Theory & Resistance in Education, were
thus focused heavily on revealing systems of oppression and exploitation, of
demonstrating the systemic and interconnected mechanisms operating behind
the backs of the oppressed. One of Freire’s great contributions—and one
that, unfortunately, has overshadowed his many others—is the dialogical and
creative means by which this takes place. This first phase of critical pedagogy
Another random document with
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 Speech of Henry W. Davis, of Maryland,

On the Mission of the American Party.

Extract from Mr. Davis’s speech in the House of Representatives, on the 6th of
Jan., 1857, on the results of the recent Presidential election:—

“The great lesson is taught by this election that both the parties
which rested their hopes on sectional hostility, stand at this day
condemned by the great majority of the country, as common
disturbers of the public peace of the country.
“The Republican party was a hasty levy, en masse, of the Northern
people to repel or revenge an intrusion by Northern votes alone.
With its occasion it must pass away. The gentlemen of the
Republican side of the House can now do nothing. They can pass no
law excluding slavery from Kansas in the next Congress—for they are
in a minority. Within two years Kansas must be a state of the Union.
She will be admitted with or without slavery, as her people prefer.
Beyond Kansas there is no question that is practically open. I speak
to practical men. Slavery does not exist in any other territory,—it is
excluded by law from several, and not likely to exist anywhere; and
the Republican party has nothing to do and can do nothing. It has no
future. Why cumbers it the ground?
“Between these two stand the firm ranks of the American party,
thinned by desertions, but still unshaken. To them the eye of the
country turns in hope. The gentleman from Georgia saluted the
Northern Democrats with the title of heroes—who swam vigorously
down the current. The men of the American party faced, in each
section, the sectional madness. They would cry neither free nor slave
Kansas; but proposed a safe administration of the laws, before which
every right would find protection. Their voice was drowned amid the
din of factions. The men of the North would have no moderation, and
they have paid the penalty. The American party elected a majority of
this House: had they of the North held fast to the great American
principle of silence on the negro question, and, firmly refusing to join
either agitation, stood by the American candidate, they would not
now be writhing, crushed beneath an utter overthrow. If they would
now destroy the Democrats, they can do it only by returning to the
American party. By it alone can a party be created strong at the
South as well as at the North. To it alone belongs a principle accepted
wherever the American name is heard—the same at the North as at
the South, on the Atlantic or the Pacific shore. It alone is free from
sectional affiliations at either end of the Union which would cripple it
at the other. Its principle is silence, peace, and compromise. It abides
by the existing law. It allows no agitation. It maintains the present
condition of affairs. It asks no change in any territory, and it will
countenance no agitation for the aggrandizement of either section.
Though thousands fell off in the day of trial—allured by ambition, or
terrified by fear—at the North and at the South, carried away by the
torrent of fanaticism in one part of the Union, or driven by the fierce
onset of the Democrats in another, who shook Southern institutions
by the violence of their attack, and half waked the sleeping negro by
painting the Republican as his liberator, still a million of men, on the
great day, in the face of both factions, heroically refused to bow the
knee to either Baal. They knew the necessities of the times, and they
set the example of sacrifice, that others might profit by it. They now
stand the hope of the nation, around whose firm ranks the shattered
elements of the great majority may rally and vindicate the right of
the majority to rule, and of the native of the land to make the law of
the land.
The recent election has developed, in an aggravated form, every
evil against which the American party protested. Again in the war of
domestic parties, Republican and Democrat have rivalled each other
in bidding for the foreign vote to turn the balance of a domestic
election. Foreign allies have decided the government of the country—
men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election—eagerly
struggled for by competing parties, mad with sectional fury, and
grasping any instrument which would prostrate their opponents.
Again, in the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the
ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence
on the political arena. These influences have brought vast multitudes
of foreign born citizens to the polls, ignorant of American interests,
without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote
on American affairs; and those votes have, in point of fact,
accomplished the present result.
The high mission of the American is to restore the influence of the
interests of the people in the conduct of affairs; to exclude appeals to
foreign birth or religious feeling as elements of power in politics; to
silence the voice of sectional strife—not by joining either section, but
by recalling the people from a profitless and maddening controversy
which aids no interest, and shakes the foundation not only of the
common industry of the people, but of the Republic itself; to lay a
storm amid whose fury no voice can be heard in behalf of the
industrial interests of the country, no eye can watch and guard the
foreign policy of the government, till our ears may be opened by the
crash of foreign war waged for purposes of political and party
ambition, in the name, but not by the authority nor for the interests,
of the American people.
Return, then, Americans of the North, from the paths of error to
which in an evil hour fierce passions and indignation have seduced
you, to the sound position of the American party—silence on the
slavery agitation. Leave the territories as they are—to the operation
of natural causes. Prevent aggression by excluding from power the
aggressors, and there will be no more wrong to redress. Awake the
national spirit to the danger and degradation of having the balance of
power held by foreigners. Recall the warnings of Washington against
foreign influence—here in our midst—wielding part of our
sovereignty; and with these sound words of wisdom let us recall the
people from paths of strife and error to guard their peace and power;
and when once the mind of the people is turned from the slavery
agitation, that party which waked the agitation will cease to have
power to disturb the peace of the land.
This is the great mission of the American party. The first condition
of success is to prevent the administration from having a majority in
the next Congress; for, with that, the agitation will be resumed for
very different objects. The Ostend manifesto is full of warning; and
they who struggle over Kansas may awake and find themselves in the
midst of an agitation compared to which that of Kansas was a
summer’s sea; whose instruments will be, not words, but the sword.
Joshua R. Giddings Against the Fugitive Slave
Law.

In the House of Representatives, April 25, 1848.

“Why, sir, I never saw a panting fugitive speeding his way to a land
of freedom, that an involuntary invocation did not burst from my
lips, that God would aid him in his flight! Such are the feelings of
every man in our free states, whose heart has not become hardened
in iniquity. I do not confine this virtue to Republicans, nor to Anti-
Slavery men; I speak of all men, of all parties, in all Christian
communities. Northern Democrats feel it; they ordinarily bow to this
higher law of their natures, and they only prove recreant to the law of
the ‘Most High,’ when they regard the interests of the Democratic
party as superior to God’s law and the rights of mankind.
“Gentlemen will bear with me when I assure them and the
President that I have seen as many as nine fugitives dining at one
time in my own house—fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, parents,
and children. When they came to my door, hungry and faint, cold
and but partially clad, I did not turn round to consult the Fugitive
Law, nor to ask the President what I should do. I knew the
constitution of my country, and would not violate it. I obeyed the
divine mandate, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. I fed them.
I clothed them, gave them money for their journey, and sent them on
their way rejoicing. I obeyed God rather than the President. I obeyed
my conscience, the dictates of my heart, the law of my moral being,
the commands of Heaven, and, I will add, the constitution of my
country; for no man of intelligence ever believed that the framers of
that instrument intended to involve their descendants of the free
states in any act that should violate the teachings of the Most High,
by seizing a fellow-being, and returning him to the hell of slavery. If
that be treason, make the most of it.
 “Mr. Bennett, of Mississippi. I want to know if the gentleman
would not have gone one step farther?
“Mr. Giddings. Yes, sir; I would have gone one step farther. I
would have driven the slave-catcher who dared pursue them from my
premises. I would have kicked him from my door-yard, if he had
made his appearance there; or, had he attempted to enter my
dwelling, I would have stricken him down upon the threshold of my
door.
 Robert Toombs on Slavery,

At Tremont Temple, Boston, January 24th, 1856.

In 1790 there were less than seven hundred thousand slaves in the
United States; in 1850 the number exceeded three and one quarter
millions. The same authority shows their increase, for the ten years
preceding the last census, to have been above twenty-eight per cent.,
or nearly three per cent. per annum, an increase equal, allowing for
the element of foreign immigration, to the white race, and nearly
three times that of the free blacks of the North. But these legal rights
of the slave embrace but a small portion of the privileges actually
enjoyed by him. He has, by universal custom, the control of much of
his own time, which is applied, at his own choice and convenience, to
the mechanic arts, to agriculture, or to some other profitable pursuit,
which not only gives him the power of purchase over many
additional necessaries of life, but over many of its luxuries, and in
numerous cases, enables him to purchase his freedom when he
desires it. Besides, the nature of the relation of master and slave
begets kindnesses, imposes duties (and secures their performance),
which exist in no other relation of capital and labor. Interest and
humanity co-operate in harmony for the well-being of slave labor.
Thus the monster objection to our institution of slavery, that it
deprives labor of its wages, cannot stand the test of a truthful
investigation. A slight examination of the true theory of wages, will
further expose its fallacy. Under a system of free labor, wages are
usually paid in money, the representative of products—under ours, in
products themselves. One of your most distinguished statesmen and
patriots, President John Adams, said that the difference to the state
was “imaginary.” “What matters it (said he) whether a landlord,
employing ten laborers on his farm, gives them annually as much
money as will buy them the necessaries of life, or gives them those
necessaries at short hand?” All experience has shown that if that be
the measure of the wages of labor, it is safer for the laborer to take
his wages in products than in their fluctuating pecuniary value.
Therefore, if we pay in the necessaries and comforts of life more than
any given amount of pecuniary wages will buy, then our laborer is
paid higher than the laborer who receives that amount of wages. The
most authentic agricultural statistics of England show that the wages
of agricultural and unskilled labor in that kingdom, not only fail to
furnish the laborer with the comforts of our slave, but even with the
necessaries of life; and no slaveholder could escape a conviction for
cruelty to his slaves who gave his slave no more of the necessaries of
life for his labor than the wages paid to their agricultural laborers by
the noblemen and gentlemen of England would buy. Under their
system man has become less valuable and less cared for than
domestic animals; and noble dukes will depopulate whole districts of
men to supply their places with sheep, and then with intrepid
audacity lecture and denounce American slaveholders.
The great conflict between labor and capital, under free
competition, has ever been how the earnings of labor shall be divided
between them. In new and sparsely settled countries, where land is
cheap, and food is easily produced, and education and intelligence
approximate equality, labor can successfully struggle in this warfare
with capital. But this is an exceptional and temporary condition of
society. In the Old World this state of things has long since passed
away, and the conflict with the lower grades of labor has long since
ceased. There the compensation of unskilled labor, which first
succumbs to capital, is reduced to a point scarcely adequate to the
continuance of the race. The rate of increase is scarcely one per cent.
per annum, and even at that rate, population, until recently, was
considered a curse; in short, capital has become the master of labor,
with all the benefits, without the natural burdens of the relation.
In this division of the earnings of labor between it and capital, the
southern slave has a marked advantage over the English laborer, and
is often equal to the free laborer of the North. Here again we are
furnished with authentic data from which to reason. The census of
1850 shows that, on the cotton estates of the South, which is the chief
branch of our agricultural industry, one-half of the arable lands are
annually put under food crops. This half is usually wholly consumed
on the farm by the laborers and necessary animals; out of the other
half must be paid all the necessary expenses of production, often
including additional supplies of food beyond the produce of the land,
which usually equals one-third of the residue, leaving but one-third
for net rent. The average rent of land in the older non-slaveholding
states is equal to one-third of the gross product, and it not
unfrequently amounts to one-half of it (in England it is sometimes
even greater), the tenant, from his portion, paying all expenses of
production and the expenses of himself and family. From this
statement it is apparent that the farm laborers of the South receive
always as much, and frequently a greater portion of the produce of
the land, than the laborer in the New or Old England. Besides, here
the portion due the slave is a charge upon the whole product of
capital and the capital itself; it is neither dependent upon seasons
nor subject to accidents, and survives his own capacity for labor, and
even the ruin of his master.
But it is objected that religious instruction is denied the slave—
while it is true that religious instruction and privileges are not
enjoined by law in all of the states, the number of slaves who are in
connection with the different churches abundantly proves the
universality of their enjoyment of those privileges. And a much larger
number of the race in slavery enjoy the consolations of religion than
the efforts of the combined Christian world have been able to convert
to Christianity out of all the millions of their countrymen who
remained in their native land.
The immoralities of the slaves, and of those connected with
slavery, are constant themes of abolition denunciation. They are
lamentably great; but it remains to be shown that they are greater
than with the laboring poor of England, or any other country. And it
is shown that our slaves are without the additional stimulant of want
to drive them to crime—we have at least removed from them the
temptation and excuse of hunger. Poor human nature is here at least
spared the wretched fate of the utter prostration of its moral nature
at the feet of its physical wants. Lord Ashley’s report to the British
Parliament shows that in the capital of that empire, perhaps within
the hearing of Stafford House and Exeter Hall, hunger alone daily
drives its thousands of men and women into the abyss of crime.
It is also objected that our slaves are debarred the benefits of
education. This objection is also well taken, and is not without force.
And for this evil the slaves are greatly indebted to the abolitionists.
Formerly in none of the slaveholding states was it forbidden to teach
slaves to read and write; but the character of the literature sought to
be furnished them by the abolitionists caused these states to take
counsel rather of their passions than their reason, and to lay the axe
at the root of the evil; better counsels will in time prevail, and this
will be remedied. It is true that the slave, from his protected position,
has less need of education than the free laborer, who has to struggle
for himself in the warfare of society; yet it is both useful to him, his
master, and society.
The want of legal protection to the marriage relation is also a
fruitful source of agitation among the opponents of slavery. The
complaint is not without foundation. This is an evil not yet removed
by law; but marriage is not inconsistent with the institution of
slavery as it exists among us, and the objection, therefore, lies rather
to an incident than to the essence of the system. But in the truth and
fact marriage does exist to a very great extent among slaves, and is
encouraged and protected by their owners; and it will be found, upon
careful investigation, that fewer children are born out of wedlock
among slaves than in the capitals of two of the most civilized
countries of Europe—Austria and France; in the former, one-half of
the children are thus born; in the latter, more than one-fourth. But
even in this we have deprived the slave of no pre-existing right. We
found the race without any knowledge of or regard for the institution
of marriage, and we are reproached with not having as yet secured to
it that, with all other blessings of civilization. To protect that and
other domestic ties by laws forbidding, under proper regulations, the
separation of families, would be wise, proper, and humane; and
some of the slaveholding states have already adopted partial
legislation for the removal of these evils. But the objection is far
more formidable in theory than in practice. The accidents and
necessities of life, the desire to better one’s condition, produce
infinitely a greater amount of separation in families of the white than
ever happens to the colored race. This is true even in the United
States, where the general condition of the people is prosperous. But
it is still more marked in Europe. The injustice and despotism of
England towards Ireland has produced more separation of Irish
families, and sundered more domestic ties within the last ten years,
than African slavery has effected since its introduction into the
United States. The twenty millions of freemen in the United States
are witnesses of the dispersive injustice of the Old World. The
general happiness, cheerfulness, and contentment of slaves attest
both the mildness and humanity of the system and their natural
adaptation to their condition. They require no standing armies to
enforce their obedience; while the evidence of discontent, and the
appliances of force to repress it, are everywhere visible among the
toiling millions of the earth; even in the northern states of this
Union, strikes and mobs, unions and combinations against
employers, attest at once the misery and discontent of labor among
them. England keeps one hundred thousand soldiers in time of
peace, a large navy, and an innumerable police, to secure obedience
to her social institutions; and physical force is the sole guarantee of
her social order, the only cement of her gigantic empire.
I have briefly traced the condition of the African race through all
ages and all countries, and described it fairly and truly under
American slavery, and I submit that the proposition is fully proven,
that his position in slavery among us is superior to any which he has
ever attained in any age or country. The picture is not without shade
as well as light; evils and imperfections cling to man and all of his
works, and this is not exempt from them.
 Judah P. Benjamin, of Louisiana,

On Slave Property, in U. S. Senate, March 11, 1858.

Examine your Constitution; are slaves the only species of property
there recognized as requiring peculiar protection? Sir, the inventive
genius of our brethren of the north is a source of vast wealth to them
and vast benefit to the nation. I saw a short time ago in one of the
New York journals, that the estimated value of a few of the patents
now before us in this Capitol for renewal was $40,000,000. I cannot
believe that the entire capital invested in inventions of this character
in the United States can fall short of one hundred and fifty or two
hundred million dollars. On what protection does this vast property
rest? Just upon that same constitutional protection which gives a
remedy to the slave owner when his property is also found outside of
the limits of the state in which he lives.
Without this protection what would be the condition of the
northern inventor? Why, sir, the Vermont inventor protected by his
own law would come to Massachusetts, and there say to the pirate
who had stolen his property, “render me up my property, or pay me
value for its use.” The Senator from Vermont would receive for
answer, if he were the counsel of this Vermont inventor, “Sir, if you
want protection for your property go to your own state; property is
governed by the laws of the state within whose jurisdiction it is
found; you have no property in your invention outside of the limits of
your state; you cannot go an inch beyond it.” Would not this be so?
Does not every man see at once that the right of the inventor to his
discovery, that the right of the poet to his inspiration, depends upon
those principles of eternal justice which God has implanted in the
heart of man, and that wherever he cannot exercise them, it is
because man, faithless to the trust that he has received from God,
denies them the protection to which they are entitled?
 Sir, follow out the illustration which the Senator from Vermont
himself has given; take his very case of the Delaware owner of a
horse riding him across the line into Pennsylvania. The Senator says:
“Now, you see that slaves are not property like other property; if
slaves were property like other property, why have you this special
clause in your constitution to protect a slave? You have no clause to
protect the horse, because horses are recognized as property
everywhere.” Mr. President, the same fallacy lurks at the bottom of
this argument, as of all the rest. Let Pennsylvania exercise her
undoubted jurisdiction over persons and things within her own
boundary; let her do as she has a perfect right to do—declare that
hereafter, within the state of Pennsylvania, there shall be no property
in horses, and that no man shall maintain a suit in her courts for the
recovery of property in a horse; and where will your horse owner be
then? Just where the English poet is now; just where the slaveholder
and the inventor would be if the Constitution, foreseeing a difference
of opinion in relation to rights in these subject-matters, had not
provided the remedy in relation to such property as might easily be
plundered. Slaves, if you please, are not property like other property
in this: that you can easily rob us of them; but as to the right in them,
that man has to overthrow the whole history of the world, he has to
overthrow every treatise on jurisprudence, he has to ignore the
common sentiment of mankind, he has to repudiate the authority of
all that is considered sacred with man, ere he can reach the
conclusion that the person who owns a slave, in a country where
slavery has been established for ages, has no other property in that
slave than the mere title which is given by the statute law of the land
where it is found.
 William Lloyd Garrison Upon the Slavery
Question.

“Tyrants! confident of its overthrow, proclaim not to your vassals,

that the American Union is an experiment of freedom, which, if it
fails, will forever demonstrate the necessity of whips for the backs,
and chains for limbs of people. Know that its subversion is essential
to the triumph of justice, the deliverance of the oppressed, the
vindication of the brotherhood of the race. It was conceived in sin,
and brought forth in iniquity; and its career has been marked by
unparalleled hypocrisy, by high-handed tyranny, by a bold defiance
of the omniscience and omnipotence of God. Freedom indignantly
disowns it, and calls for its extinction; for within its borders are three
millions of slaves, whose blood constitutes its cement, whose flesh
forms a large and flourishing branch of its commerce, and who are
ranked with four-footed beasts and creeping things. To secure the
adoption of the constitution of the United States, first, that the
African slave trade—till that time a feeble, isolated, colonial traffic—
should, for at least twenty years, be prosecuted as a national interest,
under the American flag, and protected by the national arm;
secondly, that slavery holding oligarchy, created by allowing three-
fifths of the slaveholding population to be represented by their
taskmasters, should be allowed a permanent seat in congress;
thirdly, that the slave system should be secured against internal
revolt and external invasion, by the united physical force of the
country; fourthly, that not a foot of national territory should be
granted, on which the panting fugitive from slavery might stand, and
be safe from his pursuers, thus making every citizen a slave-hunter
and slave catcher. To say that this ‘covenant with death’ shall not be
annulled—that this ‘agreement with hell’ shall continue to stand—
that this refuge of lies shall not be swept away—is to hurl defiance at
the eternal throne, and to give the lie to Him that sits thereon. It is
an attempt, alike monstrous and impracticable, to blend the light of
heaven with the darkness of the bottomless pit, to unite the living
with the dead, to associate the Son of God with the Prince of Evil.
Accursed be the American Union, as a stupendous, republican
imposture!”

“I am accused of using hard language. I admit the charge. I have

been unable to find a soft word to describe villainy, or to identify the
perpetrator of it. The man who makes a chattel of his brother—what
is he? The man who keeps back the hire of his laborers by fraud—
what is he? They who prohibit the circulation of the Bible—what are
they? They who compel three millions of men and women to herd
together like brute beasts—what are they? They who sell mothers by
the pound, and children in lots to suit purchasers—what are they? I
care not what terms are applied to them, provided they do apply. If
they are not thieves, if they are not tyrants, if they are not men
stealers, I should like to know what is their true character, and by
what names they may be called. It is as mild an epithet to say that a
thief is a thief, as to say that a spade is a spade. Words are but the
signs of ideas. ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’
Language may be misapplied, and so be absurd or unjust; as for
example, to say that an abolitionist is a fanatic, or that a slaveholder
is an honest man. But to call things by their right names is to use
neither hard nor improper language. Epithets may be rightly applied,
it is true, and yet be uttered in a hard spirit, or with a malicious
design. What then? Shall we discard all terms which are descriptive
of crime, because they are not always used with fairness and
propriety? He who, when he sees oppression, cries out against it—
who, when he beholds his equal brother trodden under foot by the
iron hoof of despotism, rushes to his rescue—who, when he sees the
weak overborne by the strong, takes his side with the former, at the
imminent peril of his own safety—such a man needs no certificate to
the excellence of his temper, or the sincerity of his heart, or the
disinterestedness of his conduct. Or is the apologist of slavery, he
who can see the victim of thieves lying bleeding and helpless on the
cold earth, and yet turn aside, like the callous-hearted priest or
Levite, who needs absolution. Let us call tyrants, tyrants; not to do
so is to misuse language, to deal treacherously with freedom, to
consent to the enslavement of mankind. It is neither amiable nor
virtuous, but a foolish and pernicious thing, not to call things by their
right names. ‘Woe unto them,’ says one of the world’s great prophets,
‘that call evil good, and good evil;’ that put darkness for light, and
light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”
 Theodore Parker Against the Fugitive Slave
Law.

His Protest Against the Return of Simms by the U. S. Commissioner

at Boston.
“Come with me, my friends, a moment more, pass over this
golgotha of human history, treading reverent as you go, for our feet
are on our mother’s graves, and our shoes defile our father’s
hallowed bones. Let us not talk of them; go farther on, look and pass
by. Come with me into the inferno of the nations, with such poor
guidance as my lamp can lend. Let us disquiet and bring up the awful
shadows of empires buried long ago, and learn a lesson from the
tomb.” “Come, old Assyria, with the Ninevitish dove upon thy
emerald crown! what laid thee low? ‘I fell by my own injustice.
Thereby Nineveh and Babylon came with me also to the ground.’”
“Oh, queenly Persia, flame of the nations, wherefore art thou so
fallen, who troddest the people under thee, bridgest the Hellespont
with ships, and pouredst thy temple-wasting millions on the world?
Because I trod the people under me, and bridged the Hellespont with
ships, and poured my temple-wasting millions on the western world,
I fell by my own misdeeds.” “Thou muse-like Grecian queen, fairest
of all thy classic sisterhood of states, enchanting yet the world with
thy sweet witchery, speaking in art and most seductive song, why
liest thou there, with beauteous yet dishonored brow, reposing on
thy broken harp? ‘I scorned the law of God; banished and poisoned
wisest, justest men; I loved the loveliness of thought, and treasured
that in more than Parian speech. But the beauty of justice, the
loveliness of love, I trod them down to earth! Lo, therefore have I
become as those barbarian states—as one of them!’” “Oh, manly and
majestic Rome, thy seven-fold mural crown all broken at thy feet,
why art thou here? It was not injustice brought thee low; for thy
great book of law is prefaced with these words—justice is the
unchanged, everlasting will to give each man his right! ‘It was not the
saint’s ideal; it was the hypocrite’s pretense.’ I made iniquity my law.
I trod the nations under me. Their wealth gilded my palaces—where
thou mayest see the fox and hear the owl—it fed my courtiers and my
courtesans. Wicked men were my cabinet counselors, the flatterer
breathed his poison in my ear. Millions of bondsmen wet the soil
with tears and blood. Do you not hear it crying yet to God? Lo, here
have I my recompense, tormented with such downfall as you see! Go
back and tell the new-born child who sitteth on the Alleghanies,
laying his either hand upon a tributary sea, a crown of thirty stars
upon his youthful brow—tell him that there are rights which states
must keep, or they shall suffer wrongs! Tell him there is a God who
keeps the black man and the white, and hurls to earth the loftiest
realm that breaks his just, eternal law! Warn the young empire, that
he come not down dim and dishonored to my shameful tomb! Tell
him that justice is the unchanging, everlasting will to give each man
his right. I knew it, broke it, and am lost. Bid him know it, keep it,
and be safe.”

The same speaker protests against the return of Simms.

“Where shall I find a parallel with men who will do such a deed—
do it in Boston? I will open the tombs and bring up most hideous
tyrants from the dead. Come, brood of monsters, let me bring up
from the deep damnation of the graves wherein your hated memories
continue for all time their never-ending rot. Come, birds of evil
omen! come, ravens, vultures, carrion crows, and see the spectacle!
come, see the meeting of congenial souls! I will disturb, disquiet, and
bring up the greatest monsters of the human race! Tremble not,
women! They cannot harm you now! Fear the living, not the dead!”
Come hither, Herod, the wicked. Thou that didst seek after that
young child’s life, and destroyed the innocents! Let me look on thy
face! No, go! Thou wert a heathen! Go, lie with the innocents thou
hast massacred. Thou art too good for this company! “Come, Nero;
thou awful Roman emperor, come up! No, thou wast drunk with
power! schooled in Roman depravity. Thou hadst, besides, the
example of thy fancied gods. Go, wait another day. I will seek a worse
man.
 “Come hither, St. Dominic! come, Torquemada; fathers of the
Inquisition! merciless monsters, seek your equal here. No; pass by.
You are no companion for such men as these. You were the servants
of the atheistic popes, of cruel kings. Go to, and get you gone.
Another time I may have work for you—now, lie there, and persevere
to rot. You are not yet quite wicked and corrupt enough for this
comparison. Go, get you gone, lest the sun goes back at sight of ye!
“Come up, thou heap of wickedness, George Jeffries! thy hands
deep purple with the blood of thy fellow-men. Ah! I know thee, awful
and accursed shade! Two hundred years after thy death men hate
thee still, not without cause. Look me upon thee! I know thy history.
Pause, and be still, while I tell to these men. * * * Come, shade of
judicial butcher. Two hundred years, thy name has been pillowed in
face of the world, and thy memory gibbeted before mankind. Let us
see how thou wilt compare with those who kidnap men in Boston.
Go, seek companionship with them. Go, claim thy kindred if such
they be. Go, tell them that the memory of the wicked shall rot; that
there is a God; an eternity; ay, and a judgment, too, where the slave
may appeal against him that made him a slave, to Him that made
him a man.
“What! Dost thou shudder? Thou turn back! These not thy
kindred! Why dost thou turn pale, as when the crowd clutched at thy
life in London street? Forgive me, that I should send thee on such an
errand, or bid thee seek companionship with such—with Boston
hunters of the slave! Thou wert not base enough! It was a great bribe
that tempted thee! Again, I say, pardon me for sending thee to keep
company with such men! Thou only struckest at men accused of
crime; not at men accused only of their birth! Thou wouldst not send
a man into bondage for two pounds! I will not rank thee with men
who, in Boston, for ten dollars, would enslave a negro now! Rest still,
Herod! Be quiet, Nero! Sleep, St. Dominic, and sleep, O Torquemada,
in your fiery jail! Sleep, Jeffries, underneath ‘the altar of the church’
which seeks, with Christian charity to hide your hated bones!”
 William H. Seward’s Speech on the Higher
Law.

In the U. S. Senate, March 11, 1850.

“But it is insisted that the admission of California shall be attended
by a COMPROMISE of questions which have arisen out of SLAVERY! I
am opposed to any such compromise in any and all the forms in
which it has been proposed. Because, while admitting the purity
and the patriotism of all from whom it is my misfortune to differ, I
think all legislative compromises radically wrong, and essentially
vicious. They involve the surrender of the exercise of judgment and
the conscience on distinct and separate questions, at distinct and
separate times, with the indispensable advantages it affords for
ascertaining the truth. They involve a relinquishment of the right to
reconsider in future the decision of the present, on questions
prematurely anticipated. And they are a usurpation as to future
questions of the providence of future legislators.
“Sir, it seems to me as if slavery had laid its paralyzing hand upon
myself, and the blood were coursing less freely than its wont through
my veins, when I endeavor to suppose that such a compromise has
been effected, and my utterance forever is arrested upon all the great
questions, social, moral, and political, arising out of a subject so
important, and yet so incomprehensible. What am I to receive in this
compromise? Freedom in California. It is well; it is a noble
acquisition; it is worth a sacrifice. But what am I to give as an
equivalent? A recognition of a claim to perpetuate slavery in the
District of Columbia; forbearance towards more stringent laws
concerning the arrest of persons suspected of being slaves found in
the free States; forbearance from the PROVISO of freedom in the
charter of new territories. None of the plans of compromise offered
demand less than two, and most of them insist on all these
conditions. The equivalent then is, some portion of liberty, some
portion of human rights in one region for liberty in another.”
“It is true indeed that the national domain is ours. It is true it was
acquired by the valor and the wealth of the whole nation. But we
hold, nevertheless, no arbitrary power over it. We hold no arbitrary
power over anything, whether acquired by law or seized by
usurpation. The constitution regulates our stewardship; the
constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to welfare and
to liberty. But there is a higher law than the constitution, which
regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same
noble purpose. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part of the
common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of
the universe. We are his stewards, and must so discharge our trust,
as to secure in the highest attainable degree their happiness. This is a
State, and we are deliberating for it, just as our fathers deliberated in
establishing the institutions we enjoy. Whatever superiority there is
in our condition and hopes over those of any other ‘kingdom’ or
‘estate,’ is due to the fortunate circumstance that our ancestors did
not leave things to ‘take their chances’ but that they ‘added
amplitude and greatness’ to our commonwealth ‘by introducing such
ordinances, constitutions, and customs as were wise.’ We in our turn
have succeeded to the same responsibilities, and we cannot approach
the duty before us wisely or justly, except we raise ourselves to the
great consideration of how we can most certainly ‘sow greatness to
our posterity and successors.’
“And now the simple, bold, and awful question which presents
itself to us is this: shall we, who are founding institutions, social and
political, for countless millions; shall we, who know by experience
the wise and just, and are free to choose them, and to reject the
erroneous and unjust; shall we establish human bondage, or permit
it by our sufferance to be established? Sir, our forefathers would not
have hesitated an hour. They found slavery existing here, and they
left it only because they could not remove it. There is not only no free
State which would now establish it, but there is no slave State which,
if it had had the free alternative, as we now have, would have
founded slavery. Indeed, our revolutionary predecessors had
precisely the same question before them in establishing an organic
law, under which the States of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin,