In this article, we posit a Marxist critique of the way that neoliberal capitalism has thwarted the possibility of comprehensive education. We begin with an explanation of the unique productive capacity of human labour, and the centrality of labour power for capitalism. We go on to show the importance of the education system for continually…

Through the use of horror movie motifs like zombies and mad doctors, "The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" (2015) stands in drastic contrast to other young adult dystopian properties like "The Hunger Games" (2012), for example, in that "Scorch Trials" uses allegory as a means to comment on neoliberalism, alienated…

This article deploys a materialist theoretical and methodological framework to analyse and discuss capitalism's disabling phenomena. It is my intention to demonstrate how Marx's concept of a "relative surplus population" may be used to scrutinise capitalism's symbols, meanings, images, and practices which reproduce ableism as the norm.…

This essay expands on the concept of educational life and builds on an autonomist Marxist framework that better allows us to understand neoliberalism's parasitic operations. Following this, the last section will confront the limits of the progressive educational imaginary and offer up for consideration postschool imaginaries. Drawing on Kathi…

This article focuses on a particular group in capitalist society that is disabled, demeaned and denied by capitalism itself, through processes of economic exploitation, systematic and systemic class exclusion, and discrimination/ prejudice- that is- the working class. In doing so I recognise that the working class (defined as all those who sell…

Social reproduction theory names at least two distinct traditions, one of which has a long history in educational research. Social reproduction theory in "education" emerged out of a concern with education's relationship to capitalist inequalities. By contrast, social reproduction "feminism" developed out of feminist…

While the loss of space for critical engagement has been a primary focus for critics of the neo-liberal transformation of higher education, the recasting of the relationship between education and economy has not meant the death of critical thinking. Instead, I argue that critical thinking has emerged as a binding point in higher education…

To date research and scholarship on privatisation in education lacks critical depth and intensity. Many accounts have been largely descriptive, focusing on how privatisation takes places, or on the threat of privatisation, or its insertion within education systems. Furthermore, work on educational commodification has been substantially dissociated…

As critical perspectives in language studies have gained legitimacy and even mainstream status in applied linguistics, it is necessary to re-examine the meaning of criticality in language studies and to re-envision criticality for further development. The authors explore criticality from several theoretical perspectives as well as from the notion…

This article examines the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism and globalized imperialism from the perspective of a Marxist-humanist approach to pedagogy known as "revolutionary critical pedagogy". It is written as an epistle to the transnational capitalist class, demanding that those who willingly serve its interests reconsider their…

In this article Paul Warmington examines the dystopian analyses pervading recent work by David Blacker, John Marsh, and Pauline Lipman. Their unsettling depictions of education under late capitalism bear witness to irreversible economic and environmental malaise, the colonization of education by neoliberalism, and the unsustainability of faith in…

Sustainability--embedded in intergovernmental global agreements and filtering, reassuringly, into "common sense"--is now the globally dominant environmental discourse. However, this dominance does not equate with the mainstreaming of its original meaning that is tied up with a radical critique of capitalism that crystallised in movements…

In this article Clayton Pierce reviews three books representative of the recent neo-Marxist literature on education: David Blacker's "The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame," John Marsh's Class Dismissed: "Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality," and Pauline Lipman's "The New Political…

Part two: This article is the second part of a project concerned with developing a Marxist critical pedagogy that moves beyond a critique of capital and toward a communist future. The article performs an educational reading of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme in order to delineate what a Marxist critical pedagogy of becoming communist might…

The present paper--from a vantage in Bulgaria, and focusing in significant part on this country as an iconic example of the "post-socialist freefall' and its dystopia on European capitalism's neocolonial "new periphery"--is a revised version of an earlier chapter in "Immiseration Capitalism and Education: Austerity, Resistance…