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The Palgrave
International Handbook of
Marxism and Education
Edited by
Richard Hall · Inny Accioly
Krystian Szadkowski
Marxism and Education

Series Editor
Richard Hall
Education and Technology
De Montfort University
Leicester, UK
This international series assumes the ongoing relevance of Marx’s contribu-
tions to critical social analysis, and encourages the development of the full-­
range of engagement with Marxist traditions both in and for education. It
celebrates scholarship and analysis across intersections, geographies, histories
and sectors, with a focus upon how the dynamics of capitalism and develop-
ments in political economy impact formal and informal education. As a result,
it aims for critique that can describe and analyse how education informs resis-
tances to capitalist social relations, and how those might be abolished or tran-
scended. The series proceeds in a spirit of openness and dialogue within and
between various conceptions of Marxism and education. However, the series
also brings those conceptions, and analyses that are informed by Marxist schol-
arship, into dialogue with their critics and other anti-capitalist traditions. The
essential feature of the series is that Marxist modes of critique and Marxist
frameworks provide living methodologies, which form inspirational resources
for renewing both educational practices and research. In this way, the series
develops socially-useful knowledge that can support action inside and against
existing structures, policies and processes of education, by rethinking their
relationship to society. The series is dedicated to the realization of positive
human potentialities through education and with Marx.
Richard Hall • Inny Accioly
Krystian Szadkowski
Editors

The Palgrave
International
Handbook of Marxism
and Education
Editors
Richard Hall Inny Accioly
De Montfort University Fluminense Federal University
Leicester, UK Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Krystian Szadkowski
Adam Mickiewicz Universitý
Poznań, Poland

Marxism and Education


ISBN 978-3-031-37251-3    ISBN 978-3-031-37252-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37252-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
­reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
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The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
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­contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
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Switzerland AG.
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Paper in this product is recyclable.


This work is dedicated to all those who teach us to struggle for other worlds,
inside, against and beyond education. They help us to weave the world otherwise.
Praise for The Palgrave International Handbook of
Marxism and Education

“This handbook represents urgent and necessary work. The struggles of the workers
and the oppressed for the socialization of knowledge, their commitment to the emanci-
pation of humanity, and the recomposition of socio-metabolism, all pulsate in educa-
tion, and are central to the arguments presented here. Such struggles through education
are the constant target of the dominant classes, aiming to profit from selling education
as a commodity, capturing public resources, and, sadly, relegating education to mere
labor force training, and as a result, we need the critical and active orientations discussed
in the handbook.”
—Virgínia Fontes, Professor at the Fluminense Federal University and
at the Florestan Fernandes National School of the Landless
Workers’ Movement (MST), Brazil

“This collection brings together an impressive array of intellectuals who adroitly dem-
onstrate the enduring relevance of various Marxist modes of analysis for exploring and
interrogating our contemporary world, the ongoing destruction wrought by capitalism
across the globe and the ways in which extant educational structures, cultures and prac-
tices reinforce those destructive tendencies.
The editors’ comprehensive introduction along with 29 newly commissioned
pieces by leading education scholars working theoretically and practically with and
through Marx and in dialogue with decolonial, indigenous, queer, feminist and anti-
racist perspectives offer fresh and unique insights that traverse arbitrarily established
conceptual boundaries.
This handbook will be an invaluable resource for educators, students, activists and all
those committed to envisioning a social horizon beyond the alienating and exploitative
nature of capitalist social organization and radically rethinking the role that liberatory
pedagogy may play in achieving that goal.”
—Dr. Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale (she/her), Associate Professor, Department
of Communication, Media and Film, University of Windsor, Canada

“At a time when critical and creative thinking is under attack as never before—whether
by neoliberalism, the far Right, and artificial “intelligence” devices that substitute for
independent thought—this volume’s emphasis on how capitalism’s valorization process
is undermining education could not be more timely. It is one of the most comprehen-
sive, engaging, and in-depth analyses of the challenges facing critical pedagogy that have
ever appeared.”
—Peter Hudis, Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Oakton
Community College, USA
“This Handbook in Marxism and Education aims to ‘recalibrate’ the conversation
between Marxism and Education by renewing as many dialogues as possible from mul-
tiple critical standpoints. Each of the entries of this remarkable volume, written by
authors from all over the world, offers a theoretical, explanatory, or empirical angle to
this conversation, be it class, race, gender, queer, ideology, theology, ecology, or labor.
The ‘dialogues in Marxism and education are increasingly relevant for describing alter-
native conceptualizations of life’ write the handbook’s editors. They gathered contribu-
tors who pushed concepts and methods beyond established demarcations to be part of
the wave of radical grassroots experiments against and beyond capitalism. The vital
question for Marxism and Education today is how to learn and educate hope radically.
This Handbook provides a guide in this direction.”
—Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Professor of Political Sociology
and Critical Theory, University of Bath, UK
Contents

Part I In: Marxist Modes and Characteristics of Analysis in


Education   1

1 Introduction:
 The Relevance of Marxism to Education  3
Richard Hall, Inny Accioly, and Krystian Szadkowski

2 Marx,
 Materialism and Education 25
Richard Hall

3 Value
 in Education: Its Web of Social Forms 47
Glenn Rikowski

4 Breaking
 Bonds: How Academic Capitalism Feeds Processes
of Academic Alienation 71
Mikko Poutanen

5 The
 Class in Race, Gender, and Learning 93
Sara Carpenter and Shahrzad Mojab

6 Foundations
 and Challenges of Polytechnic Education111
Marise Nogueira Ramos

7 Liberation
 Theology, Marxism and Education129
Luis Martínez Andrade and Allan Coelho

8 Marxism
 and Adult Education147
John D. Holst

ix
x Contents

9 In-Against-Beyond
 Metrics-Driven University: A Marxist
Critique of the Capitalist Imposition of Measure on Academic
Labor163
Jakub Krzeski

10 Classroom
 as a Site of Class Struggle183
Raju J. Das

11 Science Communication, Competitive Project-­Based


Funding and the Formal Subsumption of Academic Labor
Under Capital201
Luis Arboledas-Lérida

12 Commodification,
 the Violence of Abstraction, and Socially
Necessary Labor Time: A Marxist Analysis of High-Stakes
Testing and Capitalist Education in the United States223
Wayne Au

13 The
 Reproduction of Capitalism in Education: Althusser
and the Educational Ideological State Apparatus243
Toni Ruuska

Part II Against: Emerging Currents in Marxism and Education 261

14 Critique
 of the Political Economy of Education:
Methodological Notes for the Analysis of Global Educational
Reforms263
Inny Accioly

15 The
 Beginnings of Marxism and Workers’ Education in the
Spanish-Speaking Southern Cone: The Case of Chile281
María Alicia Rueda

16 Commodification
 and Financialization of Education in Brazil:
Trends and Particularities of Dependent Capitalism299
Roberto Leher and Hellen Balbinotti Costa

17 Critical
 Environmental Education, Marxism and
Environmental Conflicts: Some Contributions in the Light
of Latin America317
César Augusto Costa and Carlos Frederico Loureiro
Contents  xi

18 Green
 Marxism, Ecocentric Pedagogies and De-capitalization/
Decolonization333
Sayan Dey

19 Indian
 Problem to Indian Solution: Using a Racio-Marxist
Lens to Expose the Invisible War in Education355
Linda Orie

20 Re-reading
 Socialist Art: The Potential of Queer Marxism in
Education381
Bogdan Popa

21 Making
 Sense of Neoliberalism’s New Nexus Between Work
and Education, Teachers’ Work, and Teachers’ Labor
Activism: Implications for Labor and the Left397
Lois Weiner

22 Contemporary
 Student Movements and Capitalism.
A Marxist Debate413
Lorenzo Cini and Héctor Ríos-Jara

Part III Beyond: Marxism, Education and Alternatives 429

23 Revisiting
 and Revitalizing Need as Non-dualist Foundation
for a (R)evolutionary Pedagogy431
Joel Lazarus

24 Reproduction in Struggle453
David I. Backer

25 State
 and Public Policy in Education: From the Weakness of
the Public to an Agenda for Social Development and
Redistribution471
Felipe Ziotti Narita and Jeremiah Morelock

26 Marxism,
 (Higher) Education, and the Commons489
Krystian Szadkowski

27 Marx,
 Critique, and Abolition: Higher Education as
Infrastructure509
Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein
xii Contents

28 Toward
 a Decolonial Marxism: Considering the Dialectics and
Analectics in the Counter-­Geographies of Women of the
Global South537
Lilia D. Monzó and Nidžara Pečenković

29 The
 (Im)possibilities of Revolutionary Pedagogical-Political
Kinship (M)otherwise: The Gifts of (Autonomous) Marxist
Feminisms and Decolonial/Abolitionist Communitarian
Feminisms to Pedagogical-Political Projects of Collective
Liberation559
Sara C. Motta

30 Marxism
 in an Activist Key: Educational Implications of an
Activist-Transformative Philosophy581
Anna Stetsenko

31 Series
 Editor’s Afterword: Weaving Other Worlds with,
Against, and Beyond Marx601
Richard Hall

Index611
Notes on Contributors

Inny Accioly is Professor of Education at the Fluminense Federal University


in Brazil. She develops projects that connect university and grassroots move-
ments in Latin America, relating environmental education, anti-racist educa-
tion, unionism, and indigenous and traditional knowledge. She is a researcher
at the “Collective of Studies in Marxism and Education” (Brazil). In 2022, she
was elected director of the Association of Professors of the Fluminense Federal
University, a union section of the National Association of Higher Education
Teachers (Brazil). She was also elected chair of the Paulo Freire SIG of the
American Educational Research Association (AERA).
Luis Martínez Andrade received his PhD in Sociology from Ecole des Hautes
études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His previous books include
Religion Without Redemption. Social Contradictions and Awakened Dreams in
Latin America (2015), Feminismos a la Contra (2019), Ecología y Teología de
la Liberación. Critica de la modernidad/colonialidad (2019) Textos sin
Disciplina. Claves para una Teoría Crítica Anticolonial (2020), and Teoría
Crítica Anticolonial (2023). He currently holds the position of scientific col-
laborator at Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
Luis Arboledas-Lérida does research and teaches at the University of Seville
(Spain). His research interests cover a wide range of areas, from the method-
ological grounds of Marxian thought to scholarly communication and science
communication. His PhD thesis focuses on the determinants of the capitalist
relations of production that assert themselves in the genesis and development
of science communication as a social practice. Luis is currently working on a
research initiative that addresses how the so-called third mission of universities
has been publicly portrayed in the Spanish press and in outlets such as The
Conversation.
Wayne Au is a professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University
of Washington Bothell, and he has published widely on critical analyses of edu-
cation policies and practices. His most recent books include the second, revised

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

edition of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of


Inequality and A Marxist Education: Learning to Change the World.
David I. Backer is Associate Professor of Education Policy at West Chester
University, USA. His research currently focuses on applying Marxist and criti-
cal theories to school finance. He writes a newsletter called Schooling in Social
America on this theme.
Abigail Boggs is a cultural studies scholar and teaches sociology, feminist and
gender studies, and education studies at Wesleyan University. She is writing a
critical genealogy of US higher education told through the figure of the racial-
ized noncitizen student.
Sara Carpenter is Associate Professor of Adult, Community, and Higher
Education, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta. She is author of The
Ideology of Civic Engagement (2021) and co-author, with Shahrzad Mojab, of
Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism, and Knowledge (2017).
Lorenzo Cini is a Marie Curie Skłodowska Research Fellow at the University
College Dublin (UCD), working on a research project titled “COntesting
GOvernance by NUmbers: The Mobilizations of Food Delivery Couriers
across Europe in Time of the Pandemic (COGONU).” He investigates the
causes, trajectories, and outcomes of mobilizations of these workers since
2016 in different European cities before and during the Covid crisis. Lorenzo’s
main research interests are social movements and conflicts in the current trans-
formations of the world of work. On these topics, he has published several
articles and monographs. The full list of publications can be viewed on his
Google Scholar profile.
Allan Coelho received his PhD in Religious Studies from the Methodist
University of São Paulo. He received an Honourable Mention for the
Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel-Capes
Thesis Award in the area of Theology/Philosophy. He carried out postdoctoral
research under the supervision of Michael Löwy at Ecole des Hautes études en
Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He currently holds the position of Researcher at
Universidade São Francisco-USF. Most recently, he published Capitalismo
como Religião: Walter Benjamin e os Teólogos da Libertação (Recriar 2021).
César Augusto Costa is a sociologist; CNPq/Brazil researcher; professor and
researcher at the Graduate Program in Social Policy and Human Rights/
UCPEL; coordinator of the Center for Latin American Studies (NEL/
UCPEL); and researcher at the Laboratory for Investigations in Education,
Environment and Society (LIEAS/UFRJ).
Hellen Balbinotti Costa is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Program at
the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), researcher at the Coletivo de
Estudos em Marxismo e Educação (Colemarx).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Raju J. Das is a professor at York University, Toronto. He is associated with


Graduate Programs in Social and Political Thought, Geography, Environmental
Studies, and Development Studies. His teaching and research interests are
political economy, state, uneven development, and the politics of the Right and
the Left. His recent books include Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World
(2017), Marx’s Capital, Capitalism, and Limits to the State (2022),
Contradictions of Capitalist Society and Culture (2023), and The Challenges of
the New Social Democracy (2023). He has editorial affiliations with Science &
Society, Class, Race and Corporate Power, Critical Sociology, Dialectical
Anthropology and Human Geography.
Sayan Dey grew up in Kolkata, West Bengal, and is currently working as a
Postdoctoral Fellow at Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of
Witwatersrand. He is also a Faculty Fellow at The Harriet Tubman Institute,
York University, Canada; and Critical Cultural Studies Faculty, at NYI Global
Cultural, Cognitive and Linguistic Studies, New York. Some of his published
books are Myths, Histories and Decolonial Interventions: A Planetary Resistance
(2022), and Green Academia: Towards Eco-friendly Education Systems (2022).
His areas of research interests are postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, criti-
cal race studies, food humanities, and critical diversity literacy. He can be
reached at: www.sayandey.com.
Richard Hall is Professor of Education and Technology at De Montfort
University, and the research and evaluation lead for Decolonising DMU. A UK
National Teaching Fellow, Richard writes about the political economy of
higher education. He is the author of The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work
at the End of the End of History (2021), and The Alienated Academic: The
Struggle for Autonomy Inside the University (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Richard is an independent visitor for a looked-after child, and a governor of the
Leicester Primary Pupil Referral Unit. He writes about life in higher education
at http://richard-­hall.org.
John D. Holst is Associate Professor of Lifelong Learning and Adult
Education at the Pennsylvania State University-University Park Campus,
USA. He is the author of Social Movements, Civil Society, and Radical Adult
Education (2002), co-author with Stephen Brookfield of Radicalizing
Learning: Adult Education for a Just World (2010), and co-­editor with Nico
Pizzolato of Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World (2017).
Jakub Krzeski, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy
and Social Sciences of Nicolaus Copernicus University and researcher at the
Scholarly Communication Research Group. He received his degree in 2021
defending his dissertation “A Philosophical Account of Metrological Conflict
in the Field of Science Evaluation” at the Faculty of Philosophy, Adam
Mickiewicz University. His research interests focus on the social theory of
quantification, critical theory, and political ontology.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Joel Lazarus works as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department


of Social and Policy Studies, University of Bath. Joel works as qualitative lead
researcher on WorkFREE, a project bringing together an alliance of UK and
Indian researchers, Montfort Social Institute NGO, and over 1200 people liv-
ing in slum communities in Hyderabad to explore the emancipatory potential
of combining unconditional cash transfers and needs-oriented participatory
action research. Joel’s research focuses on relational approaches to develop-
ment work and work on a new theory and praxis of needs.
Roberto Leher is a professor at the Faculty of Education, and the Graduate
Program in Education at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and
researcher at CNPq and Scientist of Our State (FAPERJ). He works for the
Collective for Studies in Marxism and Education—COLEMARX. He is col-
laborator of the Florestan Fernandes National School and a former dean of the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (July 2015 to July 2019).
Carlos Frederico Loureiro holds PhD in Social Service (UFRJ). Loureiro is
full professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/UFRJ, professor in
the Graduate Program in Education (UFRJ), and coordinator of the Laboratory
of Investigations in Education, Environment and Society (LIEAS/UFRJ).
Eli Meyerhoff wrote a book, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another
World (2019), and works in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at
Duke University.
Nick Mitchell teaches about race, gender, power, and knowledge at the
University of California, Santa Cruz.
Shahrzad Mojab is Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher, and
Adult Education, OISE/University of Toronto, and the Women & Gender
Studies Institute, University of Toronto. She is co-editor, with Genevieve
Ritchie and Sara Carpenter, of Marxism and Migration (Palgrave, 2023) and
editor of Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Biographical Study (2021).
Lilia D. Monzó is Professor of Education in the College of Educational
Studies at Chapman University. She engages a Marxist-humanist, revolutionary
critical pedagogy to develop a praxis against sexism, racism, and all forms of
oppression and to develop an alternative to capitalism. She is the author of A
Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity and has
published extensively in academic journals, edited books, and online public
sources. She teaches courses on critical pedagogy, educational philosophy, and
social movements.
Jeremiah Morelock is an instructor of sociology at Boston College’s Woods
College of Advancing Studies. He is the author of The Society of the Selfie: Social
Media and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy (2021), O problema do populismo
(2019), and Pandemics, Authoritarian Populism, and Science Fiction (2021).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

He is editor of Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism (2018), How to


Critique Authoritarian Populism (2021), and The Return of History (2022).
Sara C. Motta is a proud Indigenous-Mestiza of Colombia Chibcha/Muisca,
Eastern European Jewish and Celtic lineages living, loving, resisting, and re-
existiendo on the unceded lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples, NSW,
so-called Australia. She is mother curandera, popular educator, and award-win-
ning poet and political philosopher who is currently A/Professor in Politics at
the University of Newcastle, NSW. Her latest book Liminal Subjects: Weaving
(Our) Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield) was winner of the 2020 best
Feminist Book, International Studies Associate (ISA). She has co-­ created
numerous projects of decolonizing education as healing sovereignties in Abya
Yala, UK and Australia, is a founding member of the women’s/feminized sur-
vivors sanctuary project in Mulubimba-Newcastle and is currently dreaming
into being her next book (M)otherwise: a politics of the wilds.
Felipe Ziotti Narita received a postdoctoral training at the University of São
Paulo (USP) and Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) and all four of his
degrees from the São Paulo State University (UNESP), Brazil. He is Lecturer
in Public Policy and researcher at UNESP and pro-rector of research at Baron
of Mauá University. He was commended with the Medal of the Order of Books
of the National Library of Brazil. He is the author of The Society of the Selfie
(2021) and the editor of Latency of the Crisis (2021), The Return of History
(2022), and Critique, Education and Emancipation: From Popular Education
to Social Struggles (2022).
Linda Orie is an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and
Doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the
University of Wisconsin-­Madison. Her research interests include facilitating
and studying systemic change in public schools in efforts to decrease racial
disproportionality of behavioral and academic outcomes and culturally respon-
sive curricula creation. Prior to joining UW, Linda taught middle school sci-
ence and served as summer school principal at Menominee Tribal School.
Linda also obtained degrees from Stanford University (BA Psychology) and
UW-Oshkosh (BS Education) prior to completing her MS in Curriculum &
Instruction at UW-Madison.
Nidžara Pečenković is Associate Professor of English at Santiago Canyon
College and a doctoral student in the College of Educational Studies at
Chapman University. She is interested in engaging with intersectional Marxism
as a framework to develop a pedagogy of anti-capitalism and of challenging
white supremacist patriarchy as well as other systems of oppression but also one
of co-constructing a more humanizing future.
Bogdan Popa (Transilvania University, Brașov) is an intellectual and cultural
historian. His first book, Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the Nineteenth
Century (2017), offers an analysis of shame in political thought and queer
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

theory. His second book is titled De-centering Queer Theory: Communist


Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War (2022). The book ana-
lyzes competitive models of Cold War sexuality and inserts a Marxist episte-
mology in queer theory.
Mikko Poutanen is a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University and a
senior researcher at the University of Turku, Finland. His current research
interests lie in the political economy of Nordic higher education policy and
university democracy. He also actively works with science communication in
the form of popularizing social science research to wider audiences.
Marise Nogueira Ramos graduated in Chemistry from the State University
of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). She completed her Master’s and PhD in Education
from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), with postdoctoral studies in
Ethnosociology of Professional Knowledge at the University of Trás-os-Montes
e Alto Douro (UTAD), Portugal. She carried out her research at the Joaquim
Venâncio Polytechnic School of Health, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (EPSJV/
Fiocruz). She is an associate professor at School of Education, UERJ, and per-
manent professor of the Post-Graduation Programs in Public Policies and
Human Formation at UERJ and in Professional Education in Health at
ESPJV/Fiocruz. She is one of the coordinators of the Group These—Integrated
Research Projects in Work, History, Education and Health at UFF/UERJ/
EPSJV-Fiocruz.
Glenn Rikowski is an independent scholar, based in Forest Gate, east
London. He was previously a visiting fellow in the College of Social Science,
University of Lincoln (2016–2022), a senior lecturer in the School of
Education, University of Northampton (2002–2013), a senior research fellow
in Lifelong Learning at Birmingham City University (1999–2001), and a
research fellow in the School of Education, University of Birmingham
(1994–1999). Prior to that Rikowski taught in further education colleges,
adult education, and schools in London and Essex. He was a member of the
Hillcole Group of Radical Left Educators (1994–2001).
Héctor Ríos-Jara is a researcher and writer from Chile. He received his PhD
in Social Sciences from the University College of London and an MA in
Methodology of Social Research from the University of Bristol. He is currently
Lecturer in Social Sciences at the Faculty of Government and Public Policy of
Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile. He also has been appointed as a special
advisor for higher education funding policy for the Ministry of Education for
the Government of Chile. His research specializes in neoliberalism, social and
higher education policy, and social movements.
María Alicia Rueda is an independent researcher and adult education scholar
based in the United States. Originally from Northern Chile, her research
focuses on the working-­class history of the area. María Alicia obtained a doc-
torate in Adult Education (EdD) from Northern Illinois University, and she
Notes on Contributors  xix

has taught at different colleges and universities in the North American Midwest.
She is the author of The Educational Philosophy of Luis Emilio Recabarren:
Pioneering Working-Class Education in Latin America (2020).
Toni Ruuska (DSc) is University Researcher and Adjunct Professor of
Sustainable Economy at the University of Helsinki. He is the co-editor of
Sustainability Beyond Technology (2021) and the author of Reproduction
Revisited: Capitalism, Higher Education and Ecological Crisis (2019). In his
research, Ruuska seeks to find avenues for alternative agrarian political econ-
omy. Theoretically he is involved in critical theory, ecological Marxism, and
(eco)phenomenology.
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein is a historian of university labor. He is writing a
book about the history of university food service, custodial, and maintenance
workers.
Anna Stetsenko is full Professor in Psychology and in Urban Education PhD
Programs and chair of Developmental Psychology PhD training area, at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York (since 1999), with previ-
ous work experiences in Europe (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Russia).
Her research is situated at the intersection of human development, philosophy,
and education with particular interest in agency and social transformation.
Rooted in Marxism and its extensions in Vygotsky’s project, she advances this
project and brings out its political-critical edge and activist agenda, while draw-
ing connections to the scholarship of resistance. She has proposed the transfor-
mative activist stance approach that captures politically non-neutral nature of
knowing-­being-doing including research in psychology and education, culmi-
nating in a proposal for a pedagogy of daring (summarized in her book The
Transformative Mind: Expanding Vygotsky’s Approach to Development and
Education, 2017). This research brings together and critically examines a wide
spectrum of approaches to situate and further develop activist agendas of social
justice and equity. The gist of this framework has to do with moving beyond
the canons of “neutral objectivity,” adaptation, and political quietism—to
instead radically challenge the status quo and its dogmas in both research and
wider social practices.
Krystian Szadkowski, PhD, researcher at Scholarly Communication Research
Group, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. His interests cover
Marxist political economy and transformations of higher education systems in
Central Eastern Europe. Currently he leads a research project “The Origins and
Development of the Peripheral Academic Capitalism in Poland (1990–2021)”
funded by National Science Centre (Poland). His upcoming book Capital in
Higher Education: A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sector will be pub-
lished by Palgrave in 2023.
Lois Weiner is a former career teacher, teacher educator, education researcher,
and union activist who writes widely about politics and education, specializing
in teachers’ unions. She is a professor emerita at New Jersey City University.
List of Figures

Fig. 24.1 Ontological pedagogics of the schoolteacher’s ego and orphanic


entity (special thanks to Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei at punctum
books for the permissions to reproduce this image, cited from
Dussel (2019), where it was Figure 3) 465
Fig. 24.2 Dussel’s contrast between a dominating dialectic and a liberatory
analectic (special thanks to Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei at
punctum books for the permissions to reproduce this image, cited
from Dussel (2019)) 466

xxi
PART I

In: Marxist Modes and Characteristics of


Analysis in Education
CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Relevance of Marxism


to Education

Richard Hall, Inny Accioly, and Krystian Szadkowski

1.1   The Problem of Education


What is the role of education in the reproduction of the world? What is its role
in capitalism’s valorization process? How do educational structures, cultures
and practices reproduce the ways in which capitalism mediates everyday life
for-value, through private property, commodity exchange, the division of labor
and the market? In response to the alienating realities of twenty-first-century
life, how might we reimagine education for another world? These questions
have gestated inside a space and time of polycrisis, or interconnecting crises of
capitalist reproduction, ecosystem collapse and climate forcing, and systemic
misrepresentation and marginalization for some communities. In response,
there is a renewed need for critiques that can unfold authentic and humane
educational possibilities beyond the commodity form.
This is not a new claim for education, its institutions and its laborers, be they
support staff, students, teachers or academics. There has been long-standing

R. Hall (*)
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
e-mail: rhall1@dmu.ac.uk
I. Accioly
Fluminense Federal University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
e-mail: innyaccioly@gmail.com
K. Szadkowski
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
e-mail: krysszad@amu.edu.pl

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 3
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
R. Hall et al. (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism
and Education, Marxism and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37252-0_1
4 R. HALL ET AL.

critique of what educational institutions have become under the intensification


of capitalist social relations. In 1968, the Movimento studentesco (1968/2008)
documented revolt inside-and-against the university in Italy, designed to pre-
figure a new type of society with a radically transformed school structure. At
the heart of this lay concrete disenchantment with the university as a site of
productive capability, within commodity capitalism. In these institutions,
humans were produced as commodities, with labor-power that can be sold and
then consumed within the cycle of social reproduction. This was a common
thread in analyzing the university. In May 1968, Camarades (quoted in
Feenberg, 1999, p. 24) noted that in France:

the University has become more and more an essential terrain: the intensification
of the repressive reality of the University, its increasing role in the process of social
reproduction, its active participation in maintaining the established order (cf. the
social sciences in particular), the role of science and research in economic devel-
opment, all require the institution of a right to permanent contestation in the
University, its goals, its ideology, the content of its ‘products’.

Shortly after this, the Canadian academic Le Baron (1971, p. 567) empha-
sized how essentialism within educational institutions, and especially the uni-
versity, was reproduced by academics whose egoism, competition and desire to
possess deny the potential for a new consciousness of society and education-in-­
society. The idealism and utopian or positivist methods of academics in repro-
ducing higher education (HE) and its disciplinary specificities are barriers to
revolutionary change. However, these are not the only barriers the revolution-
ary movement encounters within educational domains.
Idealism and belief in the separateness of education has the effect of portray-
ing teachers and academics as being situated outside the actual working class,
in terms of interests and privileges. At times, this is fostered because some
Marxists highlight the idea of productive labor and find it difficult to situate
the revolutionary potential of educators against this idea. Delegating education
(including HE) exclusively to the sphere of capitalist reproduction, they see
educational labor as merely unproductive labor. Yet, we continue to witness the
most profound transformations of education into capitalist sectors of produc-
tion in the proper sense (Leher & Accioly, 2016; Szadkowski, 2023).
However, this perspective is also challenged by working-class movements
fighting for liberation. The denial of access to schooling for the working class
and the suppression of struggles and revolts have been key mechanisms for
maintaining inequalities. Thus, in colonized societies, the educational ideals
necessary for capitalist reproduction were implanted in scarce and limited ways,
and only through the simple tasks of reading, writing and counting. In the
1960s, the number of native Africans who had access to education was so low
that anyone who attended school was considered privileged and belonging to
an elite (Rodney, 1973).
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO EDUCATION 5

Yet, it is important to recognize how struggles are materially and historically


nurtured, pedagogically. This requires that we do not fetishize ideas or prac-
tices from the North. For instance, while it was in northern universities that
African leaders established articulations for decolonization struggles, this was
developed on the ground, in-country. During his study period in Portugal,
Eduardo Mondlane, one of the founders of the Liberation Front of
Mozambique, had contact with Amilcar Cabral and Agostinho Neto, who led
the independence struggles of Guinea-Bissau and Angola in the 1960s.
Mutuality and revolutionary optimism fed into this process.
It was also in a university extension project that Paulo Freire developed his
world-famous, adult literacy initiative in Angicos, Northeast Brazil, in 1962
(Accioly, 2020). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Cuban revolution
inspired the emergence of grassroots movements to develop popular literacy
projects in rural zones, as part of the political struggle for land and rights. It
was a time of fruitful dialogue between students and grassroots movements,
which was interrupted by military coups that tortured and murdered university
leaders. The censorship of critical thinking had a long-term impact on educa-
tional institutions, especially in the depoliticization of teaching and research.
Witnessing and remembering how authoritarian regimes control education
with violence is crucial in challenging hegemonic political economic norms.
This matters because, over fifty years later, the restructuring of educational
institutions and infrastructures as networks for the production, circulation, and
valorization of capital has continued to accelerate. Alongside this, performative
and toxic cultures, predicated upon particular modes of performance, and
methodological practices, pivoting around value-production, have catalyzed
reports of non-being, ill-being, overwork, illness, quitting and so on, from
inside schools, colleges and universities (Hall, 2021). They have also led to
analyses of symptomatic coping behaviors, like cynicism among educators
(Allen, 2017).
Globally, these symptoms are analyzed for teachers in terms of a lack of
autonomy, assaults on professional identity and professionalism, job dissatisfac-
tion, absenteeism, worsening mental health, burnout and stress, alongside
insufficient resources and high demands (see, e.g., Maingard, 2019; Nguyen
et al., 2022). For students, symptoms analyzed include crises of mental health,
burnout, the need to work while studying, neglecting caring responsibilities
and increasing pressures around outcomes and employment (see, e.g., Ma &
Bennett, 2021). Such symptomatic analyses are then refracted against deeper
issues of representation, like race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability.
As will be seen below when we discuss the positionality of this volume, issues
of systemic misrepresentation and marginalization connect to crises of distribu-
tion. These leave many without basic means of subsistence, let alone the pos-
sibility for a self-actualized life (hooks, 1994).
Holloway (2010) deepens our pedagogical engagement with these lived
experiences of being without and being made Other, by linking them to the
crises generated by the contradictions of capitalism. He (ibid., p. 919)
6 R. HALL ET AL.

identifies the importance of situating many-sided, scientific work ‘against the


suicidal rush towards human self-annihilation’. Holloway (ibid.) goes on to
challenge the questions of reimagination at the head of this Introduction, by
emphasizing that:

the only scientific question that remains to us is: how the fuck do we get out of
this mess? This includes the question: how do we stop the reproduction of this
self-destructive society, capitalism? This is a question that it is becoming more and
more difficult to pose within a university framework.

It is also one that is difficult to pose within wider frameworks of formal school-
ing that are governed, regulated and funded from inside states working with
transnational activist networks and organizations, for-value (Ball, 2012;
Zajda, 2021).
Yet, our epistemological and ontological assumptions about Holloway’s
question and our methodological response to it are crucial. As will be argued
in the chapter, Marx’s dialectical method, grounded in history and materialism,
moves us away from evidence-based, positivist and idealist solutions that are
one-sided. Such one-sidedness reflects the reality that inside capitalist social
relations, humans are reproduced in specific ways, for instance as laborers, for-­
value. It was inherent in the Marxian project from the outset to seek an alterna-
tive, scientific expression of the relationship—one favorable to the development
of the working class and its unlimited needs (Hudis, 2012; Lebowitz, 2003)—
through a method that might bring the process of liberation to a conclusion.
Thus, Marx’s dialectical method builds from a foundation in which:

All is encircled by capitalist accumulation—the red dust of living death—and all


who attempt to flee are returned to it, in the end. Future communist prospects,
then, will find no hope in reclusion. The only emancipatory politics is one that
grows within and against the red dust of the material community of capital.
(Chuǎng, n.d.)

Our educational futures are situated against our movement, or the steps that
we take, through our methodological critique of the world as-is. Our critique
of this world seeks to understand burnout, ill-being, non-being, as symptoms
that emerge against the red dust of the material community of capital. This
materialist critique is a pedagogical starting point for pushing beyond an under-
standing of those symptoms, to reach their root in the estrangement between
Self and Other, and Self and the World. In reaching toward an analysis of the
rational kernel of capitalist life, grounded in alienated labor, this is a methodol-
ogy that desires the negation and sublation of that life.
Above all, there is an ethical duty in the critique of capitalism (Dussel,
2012), which is expressed in an active stance before the world. This is a stance
claimed by Marx when he states: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ (Marx, 1845).
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO EDUCATION 7

Having understood that capitalism relentlessly produces misery, hunger and


death, there is a responsibility to transform this toxic reality.

If I do not assume responsibility, I do not cease to be responsible for the death of


the other, who is my/our victim, and of whose victimization I am/we are an
accomplice, at least for being a human being, destined to the communal respon-
sibility of the shared vulnerability of all living people. I am/we are responsible for
the other by the fact of being human, ‘sensitivity’ open to the face of the other.
Moreover, it is not responsibility for one’s own life; it is now responsibility for the
denied life of the other. (Dussel, 2012, p. 378, our translation)

Responsibility for human life in general achieves concreteness. This cannot


remain a mere abstract conception, as we advance in critical analysis of the capi-
talist system, and recognize its real victims, in whose faces we also recognize
ourselves. Here emerges a challenge for critical educators: to overcome the
utopianism that reduces their function to the mere transformation of individual
subjects. The dissociation between educators and learners, and also the hierar-
chization between enlightened educators who guide learners, needs to be over-
come, since ‘educators need to be educated’ (Marx, 1845). Changing
circumstances and changing oneself is a unitary and continuous process carried
out in praxis (Accioly, 2021).
As we shall see, sublation is crucial in abolishing the educational world that
is (its structures, cultures and practices) and preserving the world as it unfolds
into a new, transformed educational reality. This defines a new ground, or iden-
tity, for educational life and struggle, which itself can be brought into relation
with ideas and objects with a different, or non-, identity. As the recognition
enabled through the dialectical relation of Subject and Object, or Self and
Other, it forms a way of opening-up ‘the wrongness of the world’ (Holloway
et al., 2009, p. 8), through the negative identity between the Subject and the
Object. In recognizing and working through this negative relation, the internal
relations that structure our alienating existence inside capitalism are revealed,
with the possibility for ‘negation-creation’ (ibid.) of existing material/concrete
histories and the concepts that dominate our lived experiences.
Crucially for moving beyond the symptoms of educational distress, amplify-
ing the negative moment of dialectical materialism enables those internal rela-
tions that constitute the Subject or Object (in their relation) to be understood
(Adorno, 1966). This negative moment reveals that which is left behind when
the Subject is unable to integrate the Object, and this materializes as ‘the con-
stituted untruth of the world’ (Bonefeld, 2014, p. 40). It is a critique of the
one-sidedness of the Subject, as productive worker, or teacher, technician,
librarian, student, rather than as many-sided human being. It is a critique of the
reification of social relations between Objects that have been commodified.
Inside schools and universities, revealing one-sidedness makes it possible to
critique: the political economic basis for performance management and com-
petition; the desire to generate surpluses, through student recruitment or
8 R. HALL ET AL.

knowledge spillover and commercialization; the domination of clock-time over


the working lives of teachers and students; and so on.
Moreover, this process also reveals how capitalist education sublates the
human, as it imposes particular, reductive constraints on teaching, learning,
supporting or researching. It negates or abolishes many-sided, sensuous human
activity based upon autonomy and agency, instead reducing it to the enrich-
ment of labor-power or the capacity for knowledge exchange, commercializa-
tion, impact, and so on. Yet, at the same time it preserves the humane, sensuous
core of this activity, for instance, in reproducing teaching as a labor of love, or
the value of higher education accreditation for personal growth. Systemically,
this is then used to transform practices such that they enable new levels of self-­
exploitation, for example, through lifelong learning aimed at entrepreneurship
and commodification.
This unfolding sublation of education is accelerating in an era of intersecting
crises, dubbed the Capitalocene (Moore, 2015), the Anthropocene (Malm,
2016) or the Metabolic Rift (Foster, 2017). Others argue that these modes of
analysis are contained within a deeper crisis of value, and of the production of
surplus-value, which is generating superfluous human beings (Jappe, 2014).
Yet others argue that they are a conceit from the North that neglects centuries
of expropriation in the South (Andreotti, 2021). These abstractions shape dif-
ferential modes of dialectical analysis. They also open-up the need to analyze
how and why education is repurposed to establish a foothold for capitalist
reproduction, and through them to build alternative forms of social reproduc-
tion. Our starting point for this is to renew the connections between Marx,
Marxism and education.

1.2  Renewing Dialogues in Marxism and Education


We have sketched some outlines of the relationship between education and
capitalist reproduction. These point toward Marxist modes of analysis as
socially useful in drawing upon and elaborating analytical and organizing con-
cepts, including those highlighted above like competition, dialectical material-
ism, labor and labor-power, and abolition or sublation. These concepts help us
to relate education to the emerging and unfolding, dominant political econ-
omy and its relationship with philosophy. They can be used fruitfully, in order
to understand how the structures, cultures and practices of education are medi-
ated for-value, and how this relates to those who labor in its sectors. For exam-
ple, this highlights how educational development impacts and is impacted by
modes of exploitation, expropriation and extraction inside the classroom,
school, college and university; competition, markets and the generation of sur-
plus labor, value and time through research and teaching excellence; and the
division of labor, private property and commodity exchange in shaping the
socially useful nature of educational labor.
Such deeper, conceptual analyses emerge from the material histories of
estrangement as laborers work to valorize capital. Here, it is important to
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO EDUCATION 9

recognize that the alpha and omega of Marx’s analysis, and a range of Marxist
analyses from different traditions, are potentially revolutionary. This reflects
Césaire’s (1956/1969, p. 39) invocation that: ‘I must begin. Begin what? The
only thing in the world that is worth beginning: The End of the World, no
less’. This is one of the core strands of this collection, namely that renewing
dialogues between Marxist traditions and educational contexts and actors
works to reveal the truth of the world as immanent causation, rather than as
reified objectivity, and as a result offering the possibility to reframe marginal-
ization and to generate agency.
This builds upon the work of Green (2008), who argued the importance of
mapping educational concepts, like the curriculum, performance, assessment,
impact and so on, to both the social world and the relations that construct sub-
ject and object in that world. Green (ibid., p. 15) stressed the importance of
theorizing and articulating dialectically and dialogically, and avoiding reduc-
tionism in relation to, for instance, race, gender and class. Here, it is important
to understand the complexities of the social relations of differentiation, as they
are revealed inside the classroom, pedagogic practice, assessment regimes and
so on. It is also crucial that they are revealed in our opposition to educational
engagement as the production and engagement of labor-power. Dowling
(2011, p. 207) notes that this means developing an understanding of how
social individuals are ‘situated within a global wage hierarchy that begins in the
classroom’.
For Malott and Ford (2015), this is a dialectical process of becoming, with
education predicated upon a subject’s self-reflection, in relation to the objects
of their existence. This draws out a range of contradictions, or the wrongness
of the world, which itself is shaped by the dominant epistemological and onto-
logical realities of capitalism. These are deeply positivist, grounded in ideas of
universal reason and enlightenment that emerged from settler-colonial and
racial-patriarchal societies. Such self-reflection demands forms of radical peda-
gogy that challenge students and teachers to become conscious of their own
consciousness, and in this way to become self-mediating, rather than mediated,
for instance, by the commodity-form or divisions of labor. Through self-­
reflection, one should seek to negate consciousness as defined through
estranged or alienated labor inside capitalism.
Mészáros (2005) argues that teaching is central to this project of becoming
self-mediating. This connects to Neary’s (2020) reimagination of student-as-­
producer, and the idea that revolutionary teaching is the attempt to transgress
beyond bourgeois, universal reason, as an approach that seeks to abolish the
didactic, representative power of the teacher. It celebrates cooperative produc-
tion in the classroom, as an attempt to uncover the rational kernel of life,
through an understanding of how that concrete and material production is
constructed socially, or for social ends. Here, revolutionary teaching is the rev-
elation of capital’s unwitting production of the material conditions for com-
munism (Marx, 1894/1991), and how we might set that free through a new
10 R. HALL ET AL.

political and cultural apparatus that is not dependent upon capitalist institu-
tions, like schools, colleges and universities.
Thus, Marxist analyses have sought to apply Marx’s categorical critique in
order to develop education in a new sense or as a new form of common sense.
This takes education beyond the institution, in reintegrating Subject and
Object, Self and Other, mind and body, affect and cognition, at the level of the
individual-in-society. One outcome of this might be the subsumption of the
general intellect (the ways of knowing, doing and being in society that have
been commodified by capital for-value) back inside ourselves as social beings.
The general intellect is the proletariat’s ability to subsume the forces of produc-
tion inside a new mode of production and a new set of relations of production.
For Marx and Engels (1846/1998, p. 57), this pointed toward communism
as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’. In relation
to education, Carpenter and Mojab (2011) have highlighted the need for such
a movement to embody living, learning and teaching revolution, as an imma-
nent, material practice. They (ibid., p. 215) describe the need for ‘dialectical
moments of revolutionary learning’, and the need to use such learning to over-
come our timidity in the face of capital’s power. For Carpenter and Mojab
(ibid., p. 223), as practical beings, ‘We must learn to overcome our adherence
to their power’. Our revolutionary potential emerges through material, social
activity that breaks the bonds of capitalist education, in order to liberate the
general intellect (our knowing, doing and being) for other worlds (Marx,
1857/1993).
It is crucial here to note that for each of these authors, working theoretically
and practically with and through Marx, there is no separation of educational
theorizations from critical social theory. This would be to essentialize educa-
tion or thinking about education in a way that reduces and commodifies human
experience just as capitalism does. In addressing this, Allman (2007,
pp. 51–52) argued:

I contend that Marx would have scorned the idea of a separate Marxist educa-
tional theory because it implies that education belongs to some separate aspect of
human life rather than being an integral part of the process of ‘becoming’, i.e. the
lifelong process of developing all of our human potentials and powers. It also
implies that our current existence can be understood as the sum of many separate
and distinct parts rather than as a totality of inner-connected relations.

This reemphasizes the need to unfold the relations between education, political
economy, philosophy and the lived experience of those who labor inside
schools, colleges and universities, as well as those who work in alternative edu-
cational projects.
Here, our renewal of dialogue between Marxism and education situates the
latter against social domination, containing the potential for social liberation.
This is situated not simply in terms of place and space, for instance, in the fabric
of the classroom. It is crucially a function of time, including the ways in which
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO EDUCATION 11

education accrues and commodifies past forms of knowing, doing and being,
so that they can be valorized in the present. It is also a function of how capital-
ist education focuses upon acceleration and speed-up, as well as foreclosing
upon the possibility that future time will be free, for the all-round development
of human beings.
Wendling (2009) is clear that time and the control of human activity become
encoded within the monstrousness of infrastructures and machinery. In this
way, both concrete time of actual activity and abstract measures of time that
standardize activity across a social field (as socially necessary time) are condi-
tioned externally in ways that deny agency. This brings us back to symptoms of
distress reported by educational laborers, in the form of overwork, a lack of
autonomy, the attrition of professionalism, casualization, the modularization of
learning and teaching, and so on.
Following Postone (1993), these are the symptoms of alienated social rela-
tions, with a tempo and depth that are set by socially necessary labor time. The
latter confronts all educational workers with demands that the development
and circulation of their labor-power consumes more of their lives. As Wendling
(2009, p. 197) argues:

In terms of alienated projections of the human being’s activities and potentiali-


ties, time becomes the new god. We save it; we obey it; we do not question its
existence or its history; and its sociality remains unseen.

Understanding this sociality, and its formation in space and time, is at the heart
of Marx’s dialectical method and of this volume. It is at the heart of how he
brings our attention to a range of entanglements, including the social useful-
ness of education, and its relationship to the exchange of commodities; the
wealth embedded within different ways of knowing, doing and being in the
world, commodified in the search for value that drives knowledge production;
and education as a humane process of self-actualization, self-knowledge and
self-love, and schooling that is reduced to the abstract discipline of academic
disciplines. Within this, there is the desire for free time (Marx, 1894/1991;
Thompson, 1967), or for ‘modern life freed from time’s abstract and alienating
dominations’ (Wendling, 2009, p. 199).
This points to our liberation from the clock-time of the classroom, labora-
tory, studio, school and university, and to open-up new historical possibilities
beyond those spaces and the times they produce (Meyerhoff et al., 2011).
These impose artificial forms of scarcity, whereby control of time gives control
over the labor process, the objects of labor, the laboring Self and the essence of
what it means to be human. For students, time is also controlled, both in the
present and in future, through the imposition of debt, and in how their lives
are reproduced inside expanding regimes of financialization.
How then does Marx’s method enable us to reveal capitalist education as ‘a
form of unfreedom’ (Postone, 2007, p. 70)? How does his method enable us
to analyze the historical dynamics of educational structures, cultures and
12 R. HALL ET AL.

practices in specific communal and social contexts? How does it offer us the
potential for developing new horizons of possibility beyond capitalist foreclo-
sure? These questions shape our engagement with Marx’s writing, alongside
the many Marxist traditions that seek to make sense of his work, in the contexts
of formal and alternative education, and in knowing, doing and being in
the world.

1.3  Marx and Education


Marx’s writing, journalism and activism with and for working people centered
the deep interconnections between political economy and philosophy as always-­
already unified science. It enables the richness of human essence—understood
as the dynamic ‘ensemble of social relations’ (Marx & Engels, 1846/1998)—
and the ways in which capitalist social relations feed off that richness, to be
described and analyzed. This analysis is historical and immanent, shaped as a
dialectical process, which refuses the reductionism of knowledge production
and instead attempts to unfold ways of knowing oneself in the world. By crack-
ing bourgeois political economy through a richer, philosophical analysis, Marx
enables us to take a deeply ethnographic approach to our understanding of
education, rather than one predicated upon economism (Krader, 1974).
Thus, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (1848/2002, p. 13)
remind us that the capitalist impulse is for ‘constantly revolutionizing the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society’. The constant revolutionizing of produc-
tion is social and relational, and transforms all of life into a constant, competi-
tive terrain of uncertainty. Marx and Engels (ibid.) drive this home in relation
to the recalibration of the Self by unholy power: ‘All that is solid melts into air,
all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober
senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind’. The humane
and the human must be subsumed by new conditions and new relations.
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1846/1998) begin to demon-
strate clearly how these new conditions and new relations are imposed through
the mediation of life by the division of labor, private property and commodity
exchange. They also begin to articulate how capital, as value-in-motion, struc-
tures sociability, and how it seeks to separate and divide individuals from their
labor process and its products, their whole self (corporeal, emotional, histori-
cal, social) and their very essence as human beings. Instead, Marx and Engels
(ibid., p. 86) are clear that new forms of sociability are required and that ‘only
within the community has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in
all directions; hence personal freedom becomes possible only within the com-
munity’. Marx and Engels are clear that capitalism substitutes or other forms
for the community, including in its infrastructures like schools and colleges.
Incarcerated inside these infrastructures, there is only the illusion of free-
dom and independence, and new modes of association are required in order
that self-activity might reconnect material life with human becoming. This
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO EDUCATION 13

cracks the one-sided existence of humans inside capitalism, as labor-power, as


means of enabling the social reproduction of that labor-power or as a surplus
population, presents the possibility for a many-sided, sensuous life. Marx and
Engels (ibid., pp. 438–439) also highlight that this possibility must erupt from
‘individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion’, in order to confront
the totalizing mediations that reproduce capital as private property. The educa-
tion of a revolutionary sensibility lies at the heart of such practice.
For Marx (1844/1974), this sensibility posits the individual as a social
being, working communally and in association, such that the individual and
their species-being are in relation. The particular mode of existence of an indi-
vidual relates to the general mode of existence of their species, in The Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts. In this approach, the reduction of life inside
capitalism to one’s condemnation as a productive worker or as nothing is
revealed alongside the potential for learning about and knowing oneself differ-
ently, as a social being. Self-education in community is central to this develop-
ment of a positive self-consciousness, which itself emerges from the negation of
the Self inside capitalist social relations.
Of course, Marx’s work is itself historically grounded in the dialectical rela-
tion between idealism and materialism, such that he could integrate thinking
about the philosophy of Feuerbach and Hegel, the political economy of
Ricardo, Saint-Simon and Smith, and the realities of accelerating industrial and
colonial development. At all times, this points back to human being and
becoming in the world, even in the later work that is often described as more
focused upon political economy than philosophy. Thus, in The Grundrisse
(Marx, 1857/1993, p. 594), he is clear about how the development of fixed
capital shows how social knowing and doing, and the skills, capacities and capa-
bilities, and knowledges of the community have been subsumed as the general
intellect inside capitalist infrastructures. He shows how this impacts social prac-
tices and real-life processes.
This matters in our analysis of education, precisely because Marx highlights
how human creativity is being unfolded historically and materially in ways that
are immanent to our social relations with the world. He highlights how this is
co-opted and turned against us and then colonizes nonhuman animals and our
ecosystems. This enables us to see the one-sided and alien power of capital
inside educational space-times that claim to be open and creative, and yet
which are conditioned by value production. Crucially, Marx (ibid., p. 308)
points as to how academic disciplines contribute to this conditioning:

all the progress of civilisation, or in other words every increase in the powers of
social production… in the productive powers of labour itself—such as results from
science, inventions, divisions and combinations of labour, improved means of
communication, creation of the world market, machinery etc., enriches not the
worker, but rather capital; hence only magnifies again the power dominating
over labour.
14 R. HALL ET AL.

This leads us to question the role of education in magnifying this power and
in reducing the capacities of humans to abstract measures and modes of accred-
itation. How does education develop the productive force of labor in order to
satisfy the demands of capital for value? How does education reproduce ‘the
relation of capital and labour itself, of capitalist and worker’ (ibid., p. 458,
emphasis in original)? Moreover, how does education reproduce an uncritical
acceptance of the dehumanizing, historical and material realities of capitalist
life, through which populations are rendered disposable or irrelevant?
Marx (1867/2004) helps us to think through these issues in Capital: A
Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. His critique enables us to center the
relationships between the individual and the value of their social labor and
function. Here, he analyzes the historical and material forms of production,
which contain contradictions that capital is always seeking to overcome, in part
through the development of labor-power through education. This shows us a
degraded and foreclosed means of knowing the world, through which machin-
ery, organization and infrastructure come to dominate both work and life, in
ways that are expanded through performance management and competition, in
order to impose control.
For Marx (ibid., p. 548), the example of machinery and the development of
the factory are examples for how learning, knowing, becoming are separated
out, commodified, instantiated inside alien things and then turned against the
human. Moreover, he is clear that this appears to be transhistorical and that this
is a fetishized view of capitalism. This shows us that our obsessive focus upon
education as a positional good, and a means of self-enrichment, is an illusion.
This illusion diverts us from a recognition of capitalism’s revolutionary basis,
which is constantly separating human existence, as labor-power, from the con-
ditions of labor. It is constantly separating human learning, knowing and
becoming from the conditions of life.
Moreover, through education, it normalizes the ways in which privilege and
power can be reproduced as acceptable, and the ways in which divisions of
labor, private property and the commodity shape everyday relations. In Capital,
Marx (ibid., p. 784) lays out a mode of analysis that helps us to understand the
precarious nature of work inside schools, colleges and universities, and the ways
in which humans must be ‘always ready for exploitation by capital in the inter-
ests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements’. As a result, people
become fragments of themselves, conditioned by their engagement with a frag-
mentary, formal education system.
Yet, Marx also helps us to realize that there are horizons beyond, which
might constitute alternative modes of becoming beyond the one-sided frag-
mentation of capitalism. He also helps us to think this through in relation to
our own agency-in-community, as we might decompose and reproduce our
species-being beyond the universe of valorization. Rather than our human
essence being negated in the search for value, this is the unfolding revelation of
our many-sided, sensuous humanity. At present, the form of the educational
institution, mirroring the demands of the capitalist state, frames ongoing
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO EDUCATION 15

exploitation that seeks to erase historical modes of social intercourse and the
possibility for knowing the world otherwise.
Toward the end of his life in the Ethnographic Notebooks (Krader, 1974),
Marx explored this in relation to indigenous communities and communes, and
the potential for communal shares that might enable the material flourishing of
the community. Thus later, Marx begins to look for paths away from a society
predicated upon ‘the enslaving subordination of the individual’ (Marx,
1875/1970) toward a world where the recombination of intellectual and phys-
ical work enables the all-sided individual development of the social being.
Marx’s (1875/1970) Critique of the Gotha Programme also articulates
dynamic and dialectical principles with ramifications for the labor of education.
First, he identifies the common ownership principles of cooperative society as a
transitional movement of direct, social production. This negates the essential-
izing of labor-power and its circulation as alienated labor, built on formal
schooling. Second, his Critique refuses ownership beyond the rights to indi-
vidual means of consumption. As such, it refuses the abstract mediation of the
market, as reflected in the principles underpinning experiments for coopera-
tive, educational production or educational commons. Third, he rejects liberal
rights rooted in ‘the application of an equal standard’, as realized in the abstrac-
tion of the productive laborer. This recognizes that the imposition of hege-
monic performance measures inside schools reproduces differential levels of
exploitation and domination.
These are a very few traces of Marx’s work, which remained always in a pro-
cess of becoming. We might state that his overall project of capital, incorporat-
ing volumes that he planned but would never have the time or energy to
produce, was unfinished. However, his dialectical, historical, material method-
ology allows us to see that our knowing the world is always unfinished and in
motion. As such, our relationships to our sensuous practice and its conditions,
ourselves and our essence in community and in the world are always unfolding.
By reflecting on the potential for applying his methodology to our educational
world, we develop the potential to negate, abolish and transcend our dehu-
manization inside capitalism.

1.4  Marx, In, Against and Beyond Education


One intriguing way of thinking about the relationship between education and
capitalism, and for enriching the potential for liberation through self-­education,
is to center the negation of our existing educational institutions and infrastruc-
tures, and the cultures and practices that flow through them. This consider-
ation is grounded historically and materially against global flows of value that
recalibrate education across a transnational terrain. Thus, we must analyze
being, doing and knowing inside education in order to understand the contra-
dictions and tensions that are against education and to strive for a life beyond
the toxicity of education as it is reproduced inside capitalist social relations.
16 R. HALL ET AL.

This idea of being in, against and beyond, at one-and-the-same time, reflects
the development of autonomist Marxism as a conglomerate of different per-
spectives from a European sensibility (for a list of resources, see Hall, 2015).
This mode of analysis enabled a focus on why and how capital has been trans-
formed into a globalized, transnational apparatus for accumulating wealth.
Entangled with this is the changing nature of the structure and agency of the
working class, and the role of education in generating oppositional spaces or
cracks through which to resist and push-back. In-against-beyond then ques-
tions ‘the structures that reproduce capitalism’s domination, like the State and
its educational institutions. These questions emerge from inside those struc-
tures and from perspectives that are against them, so that alternatives that lie
beyond might be opened up’ (ibid., 4).
In Marx’s writing, moving beyond is not simply the negation or abolition of
the world as-is. Rather, it is a more complex and entangled process of subla-
tion, through which objects are canceled or negated, preserved and lifted up or
transformed. In the historical and material working out of their contradictions,
the characteristics of specific objects are manifested in relation to each other,
internally. As these characteristics are negated, the particular set of social rela-
tions and conditions with other objects that they define is also abolished. Yet,
the object and its characteristics are also preserved inside new sets of social
relations and conditions, which finally transform the subject and the objective
world that they construct through a set of internal relations with these
objects-in-motion.
Thus, what it means to teach or study unfolds as society unfolds historically
and materially. As new legal and administrative forms, mental conceptions of
the world and of nature, relations to the world, organization of work and so on
emerge, old characteristics of learning, teaching, education and so on are
negated and abolished. However, they are also preserved and carried forward
inside new discourses. This affects classroom relationships, curricula, gover-
nance and regulation of educational sectors, the role of educational technol-
ogy, the place of debt and funding regimes inside national education systems.
For Marcuse (1941), sublation or Aufhebung offers the possibility for a res-
toration of the contents of an object to its true form, rather than one fetishized
and distorted inside capitalism. In-against-beyond therefore signals a transfor-
mation in self-identity, constructed historically and materially as internal rela-
tions—they are the transformed reflection of the self in relation to the object.
This is the pivot for a renewal of ways of knowing and becoming in the world,
actualized through doing and being. It is a constant movement of becoming,
which resonates with the words of Marcos (2002, p. 321), ‘The moral of the
story, I repeat, is that all final options are a trap’. The centrality of this to
Marx’s own working methodology is in realizing the connection between self-­
knowing and a dialectical opening of the Self in relation to the world.
Of course, those who write so powerfully about abolition, for instance, of
the police or prisons, situate this work in time and place, asking around what
do we organize (Davis, 2016). Is this the school or college, the curriculum, the
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO EDUCATION 17

lived experiences of communities made marginal? How do we relate this,


through our engagement with core Marxist concepts like alienated labor and
estrangement, which structure our schools and colleges, curricula and lived
experiences, against the demands of the commodity, private property and the
division of labor? Moreover, how do we relate this engagement to the possibili-
ties for self-knowing, rather than collapsing it simply into an analysis of symp-
toms or economic concepts (Marcuse, 1932)? Such engagement pushes beyond
simply abolishing what-is, like schools or national curricula, and instead works
as sublation or the positive abolition of the abstractions that structure human
and nonhuman existence.
As a result, it is important to see this work of moving beyond, as a revelation
of an ontological essence that refuses to be shaped by private property, com-
modity exchange and divisions of labor (Marx, 1844/1974). This is the deto-
nation of the limitations of knowing, doing and being as they are defined by
the compulsion to labor inside capital. Instead, it is a revelation that there exists
the possibility for humans to relate freely to each other, rather than being con-
demned as one-sided labor-power. As a social and sensuous process, this carries
the potential for self-actualization of the essence of what it means to be human,
inscribed inside particular individuals as they relate to their rich differences
with others, and the reality that these rich differences are universal.
As a process of self-education, this enables a richer contemplation of Self and
Other, subject and object, and the world (rather than value) in motion, than
that foreclosed upon in our stunted, individualized existences inside capitalism.
Self-consciousness and self-actualization, as reflections of self-education, enable
the particular to move beyond the preexisting conditions with which its exis-
tence is confronted and that shape its essence. This is a historical and material
process of liberation, as a practical, dialectical working out. In Marx’s
(1844/1974) terms, it is a dialectic of negativity as a moving and generating
principle, in which self-creation as an ongoing process is pivotal.
Following Marcuse (1941), education-as-praxis enables self-consciousness
and self-actualization through continuous confrontation of the Self with its
contradictions in the world, which can be taken up, superseded and trans-
formed. Such continuous confrontation offers the potential for rupturing the
abstract world imposed by capital, through realizing the particular, concrete
and material experiences of those made marginal. There are constant possibili-
ties here for alternative modes of world-making, which challenge the ontologi-
cal and epistemological foreclosure of capitalist education (Meyerhoff, 2019).
Such challenges, enriched through the application of Marx’s writing and
methodology, and Marxist analyses to education, sit at the heart of this volume
and generate its motive energy. They enable us to question the place of educa-
tion in the liberation of the social individual from alienating wage labor, and
from a world of social reproduction inside which alienation and estrangement
normalize exploitation, expropriation and extraction. In this, it is important to
push beyond the reduction of Marx’s work to historical laws, and to point
18 R. HALL ET AL.

toward the potential for the autonomous creation of other futures through
self-education, as knowing, doing and being in the world.

1.5  Overview of the Handbook


In The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education, we
encourage readers to engage with Marx’s work and Marxist traditions, by
offering relevant, theoretically situated case studies from a range of interna-
tional and interdisciplinary contexts. In this, we see our contributions con-
nected to other writings on Marx and education in a range of series (see, for
instance, Maisuria, 2022; Rasinski et al., 2017). In this Handbook, we demon-
strate the relevance of thorough and precise engagements with emergent
developments in Marxist theory from extant traditions and scholars, in both
the Global South and North.
The intention of the Handbook is to develop a dialectical understanding of
the interactions between the following.

• Marx’s method for the critique of political economy and its abstract,
organizing categories.
• Formal/informal educational structures, cultures and practices.
• Transnational and national governance, regulation and funding of
education.
• Histories and geographies of educational development and change, for
instance, in relation to corporate forms, the binaries of public/private
education and issues of marketization and commodification.
• The lived experiences of education and the rich range of intersectional
analyses continually rupturing critiques of education. These include the
educational role of movements that center abolition, decolonizing, indig-
enous rights, critical feminism, queer studies, Black Lives Matter and
Rhodes Must Fall.
• Established and practical work on alternative, ecological perspectives,
including buen vivir, critical environmental education, environmental
justice and the web of life.

This work proceeds in a spirit of openness and dialogue within and between
various conceptions and traditions of Marxism from the South and North, and
the ways in which explanatory categories and lived experiences can be brought
into conversation. In this, the intention is for the Handbook to contribute to
the development of Marxist analyses that push beyond established limits by
engaging with fresh perspectives and views.
Thus, the studies collected here make three points. First, Marxist modes and
characteristics of analysis need to be situated against the broad conceptual and
historical contexts for educational critique. Second, tracking emerging currents
in Marxism and education enables us to concretize the trajectories of issues
that are rupturing education as a social good. Third, dialogues in Marxism and
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO EDUCATION 19

education are increasingly relevant for describing alternative conceptualiza-


tions of life. In interpreting Marx from a range of concrete, specified positions,
we intend to model how others might generate analytical tools for themselves
in their own contexts.
It is important to emphasize the focus here on a set of emergent issues in
context, rather than on developing a standard genealogy or archaeology of
Marxist categories as they apply to education. Thus, there is a deep engage-
ment with issues of social justice, which brings Marx’s categories into conversa-
tion with identity, environment, social reproduction and so on. The shape of
our conversations around Marxism and education matters in a time that is itself
shaped against crises and fragmentation, especially for those made marginal
inside-and-against an alienating system of production.
Thus, we are reminded by Bannerji (2011, p. 56) that:

Theorists of the left or Marxists have no reason to fear ‘identity,’ because there is
enough ground in the works of Marx himself to create social movements that do
not have to choose between culture, economy, and society or ‘race,’ class, and
gender in order to organize politics of social revolution. Going beyond gestures
of intersectionality, coalition, and social cohesion, Marxists have recourse to a
non-fragmentary understanding of the social, which could change the world as
we know it.

Critiquing universal ideas and concrete experiences of the social, and the abili-
ties we have to remake the world as a movement of dignity that recognizes our
unity-in-difference, uncovers a complex ecosystem of knowing, doing and
being. Carpenter and Mojab (2011, p. 213) remind us of the challenges in
working pedagogically through this, in terms of the reductionist ‘rejection of
Marxism as an economic determinism devoid of human agency and conscious-
ness’, ‘the complex history of Marxist scholarship and activism and its relation-
ship to questions of race, gender, sexuality, and identity’ and the constant
questioning of ways of knowing generated from subject positions made mar-
ginal. Fraser (2013) situates this against the distinction between ‘injustices of
distribution and injustices of recognition’, as ‘equally primary, serious, and
real’, and which demand eradication.
The point here is to elevate the deep, social and ecological fractures that are
reproducing a disfigured world, inside which education is formalized or rup-
tured informally. The white, male factory worker of the North cannot stand-in
for the hegemonic social subject, even while the self-exploiting, white, male
entrepreneur of the North is used to define the characteristics of a productive
life. Yet, there is a need to overcome internal divisions within those differen-
tially exploited and expropriated by the capital-relation. How might struggles
in/for education or over the general intellect/mass intellectuality draw us
together inside-and-against injustices of distribution and recognition? How
might we do this work with an open pedagogy, which, first, accepts that in a
world of class fractions the development of hegemonic counter-positions is
20 R. HALL ET AL.

impossible and, second, enables mutuality and dignity as the revolutionary


opportunity?
This draws us toward Mbembe’s (2017, pp. 182, 183) critique of black
reason, and the liberatory potential of working for restitution and reparation of
‘the humanity stolen from those who have historically been subjected to pro-
cesses of abstraction and objectification’, ‘based on the idea that each person is
a repository of a portion of intrinsic humanity. This irreducible share belongs
to each of us’. Mutuality and dignity refuse Western ontological idealism
(Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), projected onto the world through settler colonial-
ism and racial patriarchy.
Thus, the inflection and recalibration of our dialogues is manifold and moves
us away from a one-sided critique, toward a many-sided critique, driven from,
first, subaltern positions; second, the experiences of those in struggle over
social reproduction; and, third, those fighting for a livable planetary web of life.
In this historical moment, the relations between Marxism and education ask us
to consider whether we can sublate the structuring alienations of whiteness,
and instead ‘live a true humanism—the humanism made to the measure of the
world’ (Césaire, 1972/2000).
Our intention is to respect and reflect this humanism, through the rich
diversity of interpretation and applications of Marx in differing contexts. As a
result, the chapters presented here weave the following.

1. Core organizing and explanatory categories used by Marxists, including


abolition; abstract labor; abstraction; accumulation; alienation, class
struggle; commodification; competition; dialectics; exploitation; expro-
priation; general intellect; historical materialism; human capital; labor-
power; reproduction schemas; social reproduction; socially necessary
labor time; struggle; and valorization.
2. Theoretical and conceptual discussions of the abolition of higher educa-
tion; adult education; alienation and education; academic labor; the
classroom; critical pedagogy; decolonizing the school; dialectical materi-
alism; the educational commons; educational reforms; feminist pedago-
gies; financialization of education; fixed capital and infrastructures; green
Marxism, eco-socialism and pedagogy; liberation theology and educa-
tion; Marxist humanism and women of color; measurement in educa-
tion; needs in the Capitalocene; onto-epistemologies and world changing;
polytechnic education; queer Marxism as pedagogy; redistribution and
public policy; research and commercialization in education; student
movements; subsumption of education; workers’ education; and value in
education.
3. Contextual discussions from Australia, Bhutan, Brazil, Chile, Columbia,
England, the European Union, Finland, India, Latin America,
Mozambique, Poland, Romania, South America, Spain and the
United States.
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO EDUCATION 21

Thus, the Handbook has a rich set of chapters with coverage from authors based
in, or writing about, Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, South America and
North America.
In our structure, we have sought to group chapters loosely in three sections.
Of course, all such divisions or separations are false, and many of the chapters
have cross-cutting themes, or focus theoretically, or in-country or regional
contexts, in ways that create links across sections. However, we have grouped
them to give some conceptual organization, around the idea of being in-­
against-­beyond, in order to develop a practical critique of capital’s competitive
dynamics and to imagine the world otherwise.
As a result, we have a set of 12 chapters that develop thinking around core
terms like dialectical materialism, value, subsumption and alienation, and which
set those up theoretically, or in relation either to specific areas of practice, like
liberation theology and adult education, or to Marxist authors, like Althusser.
These chapters are described as ‘In: Marxist Modes and Characteristics of
Analysis in Education’. They are followed by nine chapters that place critique
in context, as being ‘Against: Emerging Currents in Marxism and Education’.
These chapters develop their analyses globally or regionally, in relation to key
themes like financialization, decoloniality and green Marxism or environmen-
talism, and also by queering our engagement with Marxism or focusing on
student movements. Finally, a set of eight chapters focus our attention ‘Beyond:
Marxism, Education and Alternatives’. These chapters lead us into dialogue
with human needs and the idea of social reproduction, and thinking about
these issues in public policy and HE. We deliberately end by discussing the
world otherwise, in relation to feminist counter-geographies from the South,
decolonial feminisms and a deep, relational activism.
This is important because, while the Handbook criticizes capitalist education
and attempts to present the reader with perspectives for overcoming its alienat-
ing realities, it is also subject to its effects. In inviting authors and curating the
chapters, sickness and work overload have disproportionately affected women
and groups systemically made marginal. It grieves us that these invited voices
are not present, because of the everyday realities of survival inside capitalism.
This reiterates the importance of the work that we must undertake, of libera-
tion through mutuality and dignity in action. It reiterates the importance of
material and historical solidarity as a pedagogical process emanating from
within and across society.
As such, a more diverse spread of chapters was commissioned but proved
impossible to deliver. This would have included more work: from national lib-
eration struggles in the Middle East and North Africa; in theory generated
from sub-Saharan Africa; in the praxis of community struggles in alternative
cultural systems, like that of India; and from the development of Marxism in
China. Such analyses would also have drawn in thinkers not represented here
in detail. However, we encourage readers to engage with our Handbook as a
contribution to the rich archive detailing how Marx’s work has been infused
with concrete, material struggles. In so doing, we ask readers to reflect upon
22 R. HALL ET AL.

their own work in relation to what Marx and Engels (1846/1998, p. 57) called
communism, which, as the infinite process of critique, is ‘the real movement
which abolishes the present state of things’.

Disclosure Statement The authors have no financial interest or benefit that has arisen
from the direct applications of this research.

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CHAPTER 2

Marx, Materialism and Education

Richard Hall

2.1   Introduction: The Importance


of Material History

How might we understand the essence of our existence in the world? How
might we understand what capitalism does to that essence? This lies at the heart
of Marx’s attempts to relate: first, the philosophical to the political economic;
and second, conceptions of the ideal/universal to the material/concrete. In so
doing, his methodological process reveals a humane critique of labor inside
capital, as a relation of exploitation, expropriation and extraction. For Marx,
such relationality unfolds through concrete, material, historical practices, and
connects us with ourselves, other humans and non-human animals, and the
ecosystems and environments that enable us. These material practices bring us
into relation with objects upon which we work, and that, inside capitalism, we
seek to animate in very particular ways, to generate value.
This animation is a flow or a movement of our labor, as an activity that
brings both our knowledges and ways of knowing the world, and our skills and
expertise, to life. The ways in which we conceptualize and realize education lie
at the heart of this laboring activity, enabling particular modes of educational
production that have value, and foreclosing on others. Yet for Marx
(1867/2004), it was empirically important for us to analyze our material prac-
tices, or labor, historically, and to resist the view that any one mode of produc-
tion, like capitalism, might be definitive.

R. Hall (*)
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
e-mail: rhall1@dmu.ac.uk

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 25
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
R. Hall et al. (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism
and Education, Marxism and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37252-0_2
26 R. HALL

Material practice cannot be analyzed ‘independently of the particular form


it assumes under given social conditions’ (ibid., p. 177), and this applies to
schooling, teaching, learning and researching. By analyzing the resulting social
formations in their historical entirety, their alienating realities might be over-
come. Otherwise, we risk focusing our analysis on: first, finding solutions to
the symptoms of those realities, like the mental health crisis amongst school
children in the global North, and the chronic overwork reported by teachers;
second, utopian thinking, for instance in fetishizing an idealized, former,
golden age of schooling; and third, wishful thinking about educational utopias
beyond capitalism.
In his material, historical analyses, Marx used specific moments pedagogi-
cally, for instance, the 1848 revolutions in Europe (in The Communist Manifesto
(Marx & Engels, 1848/2002)), or the 1851 coup in France of Louis-Napoléon
Bonaparte (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (Marx 1852)). They
situate the energy of particular events against the deep, historical relations
between: humans and nature in the direct process of the production of life; the
process of the production of the social relations of life; and, the mental concep-
tions that flow from those relations (Marx, 1867/2004). He used this as an
activist, journalist, and philosopher, to help working people reveal the logic of
their existences.
Yet, Marx was clear about the limits to agency. The unfolding process of
history is so deeply entwined in our ways of knowing, doing and being in the
world, that people may:

make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make
it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already,
given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs
like a nightmare on the brains of the living. (Marx, 1852)

Here, the role of ideas is crucial, but only in relation to material activity, or
doing in the world. However, a broader examination of circumstances is funda-
mental in understanding how Marx conceptualizes human existence inside
capitalism, and the ways in which it relates to an alienated human essence (Hall,
2018). This is in terms of: first, the concrete, material activities that humans
undertake in the world and that reflect their existence (like classroom practices
and relationships); and second, our more abstract conceptualizations of what
that activity represents (like socially-defined ideals of good/bad teaching and
learning). The flow between the concrete and the abstract is at the heart of the
methodological movement of Marx’s materialist critique.
In this flow, Postone’s (1993) analysis of Marx’s materialism as a critique of
labor inside capital, which itself constructs deeply alienating-yet-entangled
social relations, is important. Analyses of the movement of labor or capitalist
work, through the control of labor-power as the key commodity that humans
have to trade (Marx, 1867/2004), enable us to trace access to surplus-value,
profit, and ultimately money (as commodity or capital), and the expansion of
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Title: Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club


A quarterly journal of ornithology, Volume VII (1882)

Creator: Nuttall Ornithological Club

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BULLETIN


OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB ***
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granted to the public domain.
BULLETIN

OF THE

Nuttall Ornithological Club:


A Quarterly Journal of Ornithology.

VOLUME VII.

Editor.
J. A. ALLEN.
Associate Editors.
S. F. BAIRD AND ELLIOTT COUES.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.:
PUBLISHED BY THE CLUB.
1882
W. H. Wheeler, Printer,
15 & 17 Brighton Street, Cambridge, Mass.
1882.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME VII.
NUMBER I.

Page.
On an apparently New Heron from Florida. By Robert Ridgway. 1
List of Birds observed at Houston, Harris Co., Texas, and Vicinity,
and in the Counties Montgomery, Galveston, and Ford Bend. By
H. Nehrling. 6
On the Sesamoid at the front of the Carpus in Birds. By F. Amory
Jeffries. 13
Notes on Some of the Birds observed near Wheatland, Knox Co.,
Indiana, in the Spring of 1881. By Robert Ridgway. 15
Notes on the Habits and Changes of Plumage of the Acadian Owl
(Nyctale acadica), with some additional Records of its Breeding
in Massachusetts. By William Brewster. 23
Description of a New Race of Peucæa ruficeps from Texas. By
Nathan Clifford Brown. 26
On Kennicott’s Owl and some of its Allies, with a Description of
a proposed New Race. By William Brewster. 27
A Reconnoissance in Southwestern Texas. By Nathan Clifford
Brown. 33

RECENT LITERATURE.

Memorial Volume of Garrod’s Scientific Papers, 43; Shufeldt’s


Osteology of the North American Tetraonidæ, 44; Illustrations of
Ohio Nests and Eggs, 45; Shufeldt’s “The Claw on the Index Digit of
the Cathartidæ,” 46; Papers on Minnesota Birds, 47; Freke on the
Birds of Amelia County, Virginia, 48; Langdon’s Field Notes on
Louisiana Birds, 48; Krider’s Field Notes, 49; Langdon’s Zoölogical
Miscellany, 50; Hoffman on the Birds of Nevada, 51.

GENERAL NOTES.

The Tufted Titmouse on Staten Island, N. Y., 52; Nesting of the White-
bellied Wren (Thryothorus bewicki leucogaster), 52; An Erroneous
Record of the Orange-crowned Warbler (Helminthophaga celata) in
New Hampshire, 53; On the Generic Name Helminthophaga, 53;
Dendræca palmarum again in Massachusetts, 54; Ampelis cedrorum
as a Sap-sucker, 54; Capture of Plectrophanes lapponicus in Chester,
S. C., 54; Occurrence of Coturniculus lecontei in Chester County,
South Carolina, 54; The Sharp-tailed Finch in Kansas, 55; Note on
Mitrephanes, a New Generic Name, 55; Nesting of Empidonax
minimus and Helmintherus vermivorus in Pennsylvania and New
Jersey, 55; Cuckoos laying in the Nests of other Birds, 56;
Melanerpes erythrocephalus about Boston, 57; The Barn Owl in
Maine; a Retraction, 58; The Snowy Owl at Fort Walla Walla, W. T.,
58; Capture of the Golden Eagle in Crawford County, Pennsylvania,
58; The Swallow-tailed Kite in Dakota, 59; A Remarkable Specimen
of the Pinnated Grouse (Cupidonia cupido), 59; Wilson’s Plover
(Ægialites wilsonius) in New England, 59; Capture of Baird’s
Sandpiper on Long Island, N. Y., 60; An Addition to the Maine
Fauna, 60; Capture of Larus leucopterus near Boston, 60; The Great
Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) from a new Locality, 60; The
Snake-bird in Kansas, 61; Capture of the Sea Dove 150 Miles from the
Sea, 61; Additions to the Catalogue of North American Birds, 61;
Notes on Some Birds of the Belt Mountains, Montana Territory, 61;
Remarks on Some Western Vermont Birds, 63.

Erratum 64

NUMBER II.

On a Collection of Birds lately made by Mr. F. Stephens in


Arizona. By William Brewster. 65
Notes on the Os Prominens. By Frederic A Lucas. 86
A List of Birds from the Lower Mississippi Valley, observed
during the Summer of 1881, with brief Notes. By O. P. Hay. 89
Impressions of some Southern Birds. By William Brewster. 94
Notes on some of the Rarer Birds of Southern New Brunswick.
By Montague Chamberlain. 104

Notes on the Summer Birds of the Upper St. John. By Charles F.


Batchelder. 106

RECENT LITERATURE.
Dr. Coues’ New Check List and Dictionary, 111; Nests and Eggs of Ohio
Birds, 112; Professor Macoun’s Report of Exploration, 113;
Knowlton’s Revised List of the Birds of Brandon, Vermont, 113;
Krukenberg on the Coloring Matter of Feathers, 114; Minor
Ornithological Papers, 115.

GENERAL NOTES.

Description of a Nest of the Water Ouzel, 118; The Short-billed Marsh


Wren in New Hampshire, 118; Early Arrival of the Yellow Rump in
Southern Maine, 119; Late Stay (probable Wintering) of Dendrœca
pinus in Massachusetts, 119; The Hooded Warbler in Western New
York, 119; Breeding of the Pine Grosbeak (Pinicola enucleator) in
Lower Canada, 120; Coturniculus lecontei, C. henslowi, and
Cistothorus stellaris in Florida, 121; Ammodramus caudacutus—a
somewhat Inland Record on the Atlantic Coast, 122; The White-
throated Sparrow in Winter near Worcester, Mass., 122; Peucæa
ruficeps eremœca, 122; The Canada Jay at Portland, Maine, 122; The
White-throated Swift breeding on Belt River, Montana, 122; Capture
of the Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaëtus canadensis) near Columbus,
Ohio, 123; The Little Blue Heron in Maine, 123; Baird’s Sandpiper on
Long Island, N. Y.—a Correction, 123; Pelidna subarquata on the
Maine Coast, 124; The King Rail in New England, 124; Purple
Gallinule (Ionornis martinica) in Rhode Island, 124; Note on the
Habits of the Young of Gallinula galeata and Podilymbus podiceps,
124; Rhynchops nigra—an Early Record for the Massachusetts Coast,
125; Notes on the Habits of the Kittiwake Gull, 125; Sterna forsteri
breeding off the Eastern Shore of Virginia, 126; Note on the Foot of
Accipiter fuscus, 126; Supplementary Notes on two Texas Birds, 127;
Addenda to the Preliminary list of Birds ascertained to occur in the
Adirondack Region, Northeastern New York, 128.

Errata 128

NUMBER III.

The Colors of Feathers. (Plate I.) By J. Amory Jeffries 129


On a Collection of Birds lately made by Mr. F. Stephens in
Arizona. By William Brewster 135
Notes on the Summer Birds of the Upper St. John. By Charles F. 147
Batchelder
A Sketch of the Home of Hylocichla aliciæ bicknelli, Ridgway, with
some Critical Remarks on the Allies of this New Race. By
Eugene P. Bicknell 152
Short Notes on the Birds of Bayou Sara, Louisiana. By Charles
Wickliffe Beckham 159
List of Birds observed at Houston, Harris Co., Texas, and in the
Counties Montgomery, Galveston, and Ford Bend. By H.
Nehrling 166

RECENT LITERATURE.

Bailey’s Index to Forest and Stream, 175; Chamberlain’s Catalogue of


the Birds of New Brunswick, 176; Krukenberg on the Coloring Matter
of Feathers, Second Part, 177; Stejneger’s Nomenclatural
Innovations, 178; Ingersoll’s Birds’-Nesting, 179.

GENERAL NOTES.

Note on Mimus polyglottus, 180; The Nest of the House Wren, 180;
Remarkable plumage of the Orchard Oriole, 181; The Nest and Eggs
of Perisoreus canadensis, 181; Notes on the Plumage of Nephæcetes
niger borealis, 182; Plumage of the Young of Eclectus polychlorus,
183; An Owl’s Egg laid in Confinement, 183; Buteo brachyurus—a
Correction, 184; The Turkey Buzzard in New Hampshire, 184;
Rapacious Birds in Confinement, 184; Note on Mareca americana,
185; Destruction of Birds by the Cold Wave of May 21st and 22d, 185;
More Definite Statistics needed in regard to the Abundance of Birds,
186; Remarks on Five Maine Birds, 189; Maine Notes, 190; Stray
Notes from Lookout Mountain, Tenn., 191.

Errata 192

NUMBER IV.

On a Collection of Birds lately made by Mr. F. Stephens in


Arizona. By William Brewster 193
Notes upon the Osteology of Cinclus mexicanus. By R. W. Shufeldt 213
List of Birds observed at Houston, Harris Co., Texas, and in the
Counties Montgomery, Galveston, and Ford Bend. By H.
Nehrling 222
Notes on some Birds collected by Capt. Charles Bendire at Fort
Walla Walla, Washington Territory. By William Brewster 225
List of Birds ascertained to occur within Ten Miles from Point
de Monts, Province of Quebec, Canada, based chiefly upon the
Notes of Napoleon A. Comeau. By C. Hart Merriam 233

RECENT LITERATURE.

The Coues Check List and Ornithological Dictionary, 242; Gentry’s


Nests and Eggs of Birds of the United States, 246.

GENERAL NOTES.

Dendræca palmarum at Sing Sing, N. Y., 249; Nest and Eggs of


Setophaga picta—a Correction, 249; The Summer Tanager (Pyranga
æstiva) in New Brunswick, 249; The Evening Grosbeak in New York,
250; The Black-throated Bunting in Florida, 250; Distribution of the
Fish Crow (Corvus ossifragus), 250; The Swallow-tailed Kite
(Elanoïdes forficatus) taken in Southern Michigan, 250: Garzetta
candidissima at Nantucket, Massachusetts, 251; The Snow Goose
(Chen hyperboreus) at Sing Sing, N. Y., 251: Note on the Long-tailed
Duck, 251; Lomvia arra brünnichi and L. troile in New England, 251;
Rare Warblers in Massachusetts, 252; The Unusual “Wave” of Birds
during the Spring Migration of 1882, 252; Birds new or rare in the
District of Columbia, 253; Notes on some Birds and Eggs from the
Magdalen Islands, Gulf of St. Lawrence, 253; Second Addendum to
the Preliminary List of Birds ascertained to occur in the Adirondack
region, Northeastern New York, 256; List of Additions to the
Catalogue of North American Birds, 257.

Index 259
BULLETIN
OF THE
NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB.
VOL. VII. January, 1882. No. I.

ON AN APPARENTLY NEW HERON FROM


FLORIDA.
BY ROBERT RIDGWAY.

The following facts in relation to an apparently hitherto unnoticed


large Heron found in Southwestern Florida, I am kindly permitted to
lay before the readers of the Nuttall Bulletin, by Mr. Charles W.
Ward, of Pontiac, Michigan, who spent several weeks at the breeding
grounds of the bird in question, and was thus enabled to make many
very interesting observations on its habits, etc. Mr. Ward’s
memoranda are especially interesting in connection with the
question of Ardea occidentalis Aud. and A. würdemanni Baird, but
unfortunately the matter, in the light of the evidence which he
adduces, becomes involved in greater obscurity than before.
Under date of September 3 (1881), Mr. Ward writes as follows:—
“My observations of the Herons during the past season do not
correspond with those of Mr. N. B. Moore, as recorded on page 232
of your article[1], in regard to their feeding habits. I found them
generally living in communities, roosting, nesting, and feeding
together, like Pigeons, and often observed flocks of the Little White,
Reddish, and other Egrets, feeding together like Teal Ducks. Two
specimens of A. occidentalis were seen feeding quietly within twenty
feet of one of the Herons procured by me [A. wardi, nobis]. They
were feeding on a mud bar at low tide. I was once concealed in the
low brush near a small pool watching three Louisiana Egrets chasing
minnows, when two of them making for the same minnow squared
off for a knock-down, while the third coolly appropriated the prize,
leaving the combatants situated like complainant and defendant at
the close of a law suit. In all my observations of the Herons I have
seen nothing to lead to a conclusion that one of these birds held any
particular antipathy against its own species while feeding. In the
many squabbles between Herons on their feeding grounds the
encounters occurred quite as often between different species as
members of the same species. It may be that during the breeding
season they are more friendly than at other times. In order that you
may understand my opportunities for observing these birds, I
enclose a rough map of Mound Key and surroundings, my camping
place from January 20 till April 10. As you will see by the figures
marked ... it was in the midst of their feeding grounds, these places
being mud- and sand-bars, bare at low tide. Regarding the Reddish
Egret, among many thousands of them I saw only one in the pure
white plumage, and no white young; but one of my dark specimens
has white feathers on the head and in the tail, while one of the
secondary quills has the outer web chiefly white. My companion of
last winter’s Florida trip reports that he saw no Reddish Egrets with
white except on the secondaries.
“Regarding the large Herons [i.e., A. wardi], I am much inclined to
think them a geographical variety ... the specimens being very
uniform in color.... I examined some thirty nests at least, fifteen of
which contained young, all being dark colored, with one exception.
These birds are common in Southwestern Florida, and their nests are
frequently found along the coast. From all the information at my
command, connected with my own observations, I am almost
convinced that the bird in question is separate and distinct from A.
occidentalis and A. würdemanni, and the fact that Audubon found
the former in immense numbers among the mangrove islands of
Eastern Florida is strong evidence that he happened in the vicinity of
one of their rookeries. As you will observe by examining the diagram
of my camping place and noting the rookeries of large Herons ...
these birds were quite common in that vicinity, while I saw only a
few specimens of A. occidentalis. The white bird found in the nest
with the blue might have come there from an adjoining empty nest,
some 30 or 40 feet distant, as it could easily have done, being nearly
full-grown. This surmise is strengthened by the circumstance that I
saw a large white Heron on the island marked ‘*,’ and my companion
killed a similar, if not the same, specimen on the large island marked
‘2,’ which he threw away, supposing it to be a common White Egret
[Herodias egretta]. These I now believe to have been A. occidentalis;
the other [H. egretta] was then laying its eggs, while the description
of A. occidentalis corresponds to my recollection of the bird he killed.
At the time, I was not familiar with the description of A. occidentalis.
“In the Little Blue Heron [Florida cærulea] and Reddish Egret
(Dichromanassa rufa), where dichromatism appears to be an
established fact, each species presents different phases and mixtures
of both colors, especially the Little Blue, which shows almost every
variety of curious markings of blue and white; while in the Reddish
Egret, one specimen shows white on the head, tail, and wings, and
others reported by Mr. Adams show white on the wings.
“As before said, I believe the bird to be a geographical variation of
A. herodias, residing permanently and breeding in South Florida. I
think that further search and observation will develop more evidence
concerning A. occidentalis and A. würdemanni, which may result in
confirming your theory of their being one and the same species. You
will pardon my opposing your opinion, but my convictions are so
strong that only the finding of white birds with blue young and more
cases of blue parents with white young, or adults showing mixtures
of both phases, would overcome them.”
Assuming that the large white birds observed by Mr. Ward were
really a white phase of the dark-colored birds obtained by him, and
which were so numerous in the locality, it certainly appears strange
that so few of the former were seen. The case of the Reddish Egret,
which he cites, affords, however, an exact parallel, and it is now
considered established beyond question that “Peale’s Egret” (Ardea
pealei Bonap.—a pure white bird) is merely a white phase of this
species. As to the comparative rarity of these large white birds, in the
locality where observed by Mr. Ward, militating against any theory of
their specific identity with the dark-colored birds, it should be
remembered that in the case of nearly every dichromatic species of
bird this condition is more or less variable with locality. A pertinent
example may be cited in the case of Demiegretta sacra, a Heron of
wide distribution in the Far East. This species inhabits a
considerable number of islands in the Polynesian group, and it has
been noticed and recorded by naturalists who have visited that
region, that on some islands all or nearly all the birds of this species
are dark colored, on others all or nearly all are white, while on others
still there may be a more equal proportion of the two phases. It may
be remarked that the two phases in this species are even more
distinct in coloration than in the case of Dichromanassa rufa, the
colored phase being darker than in the latter species. Upon the
whole, even admitting the possibility of the white young bird seen by
Mr. Ward having of its own volition taken up its abode in a nest
containing dark-colored young, I am strongly inclined to believe that
it belonged to the same species with the latter, the question of its
parentage (i.e., whether its parents were white or dark-colored birds)
being a comparatively unimportant consideration, as affecting the
main question. But in adopting the view of their specific identity a
problem arises which in the light of our present knowledge appears
unsolvable, and which may be briefly stated thus:—
The large “blue” Herons obtained by Mr. Ward are, in every
respect as regards size and proportions, identical with Ardea
occidentalis Aud. and A. würdemanni Baird; in coloration they agree
exactly with the latter, except only in the pattern of the head and tint
of the neck, which are precisely as in A. herodias. The bird in
question is apparently “dichromatic,” having a white phase; hence,
assuming that A. occidentalis and A. würdemanni are dichromatic
phases of one species, it necessarily follows that white individuals of
the bird in question would be absolutely indistinguishable from
white examples of A. occidentalis! Still, in view of the fact that the
colored phase differs from A. würdemanni in its most essential
feature of coloration, i.e., the pattern of the head markings, it seems
impossible to unite them, unless it can be shown that the type of A.
würdemanni does not represent the perfect colored phase of that
species.[2] There are hence several hypotheses which might be
plausibly argued upon theoretical grounds, and which may be stated
as follows: (1) That A. occidentalis, A. würdemanni, A. wardi, and A.
herodias all belong to a single species, which reaches its extremes of
variation in the first- and last-named; (2) That these names include
three distinct races or species: A. herodias, which is never white; A.
occidentalis, which is dichromatic (having separate white and
colored phases), and A. wardi, also dichromatic, its white phase
indistinguishable from that of A. occidentalis, and its colored phase
distinguishable from that of the same species (A. würdemanni) by
the different pattern and color of the head and neck alone; and (3)
that there are two species, A. occidentalis and A. herodias, which in
Florida hybridize on an extensive scale, producing the intermediate
specimens which have been distinguished as A. würdemanni and A.
wardi.
Of these hypotheses I have, after careful consideration of them all,
concluded to adopt the second as being most consistent with known
facts, and accordingly propose for the bird in question the name

486* Ardea wardi Ridgw.


Ward’s Heron.

With the following characters:—

Ch.—Colored phase exactly like A. würdemanni (= dark phase of A.


occidentalis?), but with the head colored as in A. herodias. Differing from herodias
in much larger size (culmen 6.50–7.00 inches, tarsus, 8.50–9.00 inches), lighter
general coloration, and (in dried skin) light brown instead of black legs.
Dichromatic; the white phase being indistinguishable from that of A. occidentalis
(?).
Adult ♂ (No. 82,329, U. S. Nat. Mus., Oyster Bay, Florida, March, 1881; Chas. W.
Ward): Head white, with the sides of the crown and entire occiput (including the
lengthened plumes) deep black;[3] neck lavender-gray (much lighter than in the
type of würdemanni), the fore-neck white thickly streaked with black for the lower
two-thirds; jugular plumes chiefly white, their lengthened tapering portion entirely
so. Upper surface uniform bluish plumbeous, the lengthened scapular plumes
hoary whitish or pale silvery gray. Upper breast uniform black; abdomen and lower
breast white, rather indistinctly streaked with dark gray; anal region mixed black
and white, in longitudinal dashes (the black rather predominating); crissum
immaculate pure white. Tibiæ uniform light cinnamon; edge of the wing (especially
near the bend) deeper cinnamon, but this much mixed with white toward the bases
of the quills; lining of the wing, axillars, sides, and flanks, uniform plumbeous. Bill,
apparently, entirely olivaceous-yellow; naked portion of tibiæ very pale brown
(evidently yellowish or flesh-colored in life); tarsi light brown (olivaceous in life?),
darker in front; toes light brown. Wing, 20.50: culmen, 6.75; depth of bill through
nostril, 1.10; tarsus, 8.75; middle toe, 5.10; naked portion of tibiæ, 5.50.

Mr. W. H. Collins, of Detroit, who kindly presented the specimen


described above to the National Museum, has sent me measurements
of two other specimens, one in his own possession, the other
mounted for Mr. Ward. As may be seen below they agree closely in
dimensions with the type, their measurements being, respectively,
wing 20.00–20.50; culmen 6.50–7.00; depth of bill through nostril,
1.25; tarsus, 8.75–9.00; middle toe, 5.25–5.45; naked portion of
tibia, 5.75–6.00.
LIST OF BIRDS OBSERVED AT HOUSTON,
HARRIS CO., TEXAS AND VICINITY AND IN
THE COUNTIES MONTGOMERY,
GALVESTON AND FORD BEND.
BY H. NEHRLING.

1. Turdus migratorius, L. Robin.—Very common in the woods


from November to April. Very shy and retiring during their stay; only
a few have been observed in the larger gardens of Houston. Feeds
abundantly on the berries of the holly (Ilex opaca) and the myrtle-
holly (Oreophila myrtifolia). About the 15th of April all have
departed for the North.
2. Turdus mustelinus, Gmel. Wood Thrush.—Arrives from the
North early in October when the aromatic berries of the Magnolia
grandiflora are ripe, on which they eagerly feed. On account of this
food the flesh is very delicate and large numbers are killed by pot
hunters, who call them “Grassets.” In the winter months they appear
not to be common and inhabit swampy thickets and bottom woods.
3. Turdus fuscescens, Steph. Wilson’s Thrush.—Only a few
observed during the fall migration.
4. Turdus swainsoni, Cab. Olive-backed Thrush.—Not rare
during the migrations.
5. Mimus polyglottus, Boie. Mockingbird.—A very abundant
resident. Only a few remain to winter, in protected localities; the
majority migrate further south. They arrive from their winter
quarters early in March and are by the end of that month again
common. Nest-building commences usually in the middle of April.
Many are killed by farmers and gardeners on account of their
fondness for ripe figs and grapes. Besides insects, they feed eagerly
on the berries of the poke (Phytolacca decandra), the elder

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