How to be a Marxist in the Academy: Athusserian Theories of Education

Join us for a roundtable discussion of Althusser’s thinking on education, pedagogy, student politics and educational labour --------------------------------------------------------------------- This roundtable will discuss the writings produced by Althusser and his collaborators on the topics of education, pedagogy, student politics and educational labour, with a particular focus on the unpublished materials from the short-lived École project (1968-1972). With contributions from Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Christian Baudelot, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Michel Tort, École was set to be a collective volume aspiring to a wide-reaching Marxist account of the education system which remained unfinished due to intellectual and political differences within the group. What remained of the project is documented in Althusser’s archive held at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC). The archival material shows the scope, depth and dynamism of the research itinerary plotted by the École collective. Only recently has the École repository come to the attention of Althusserian scholarship. In his foreword to the On the Reproduction of Capitalism (2014) collection, Balibar already offered cues to the importance of the École project in the construction of the concept of the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’. Recent secondary literatures (Bruschi 2019, Clemente 2021, Riondet 2021, Mozzachiodi 2022), dwelling on the vast array of materials held at the IMEC, have shown the extent to which the problematics formed in the École project contributed to much of Althusser’s post-’68 thought. Indeed, the absence of any published record of the École project represents a massive omission in the Althusserian canon. Secondary literatures also point to the afterlives of the École project in some of the major contributions to Marxist educational theory during the seventies, including L’école capitaliste en France (1970) by Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, Le Français national : Politique et pratiques de la langue nationale sous la Révolution française (1974) by Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte and le quotient intellectual by Michel Tort, along with theoretico-political groups such as Le Groupe de Recherches sur l’Enseignement Philosophique (GREPH). The École writings and Althusser’s lesser-known engagements with the question of education provide a vital theoretical resource for researchers attempting to reconstruct an Althusserian or Marxist theory of education. Contributions in this roundtable will detail and contextualise the contents of these writings, evaluate their place in the history of Marxist accounts of education and assess their usefulness in forging a Marxist theory and politics of education for today. This roundtable is prompted by the publication of Roberto Mozzachiodi’s article ’The Difficulty of Being a Marxist in Philosophy’ : Mozzachiodi, R. M. (2022). The Difficulty of Being a Marxist in Philosophy, Historical Materialism, 30(3), 116-144. doi: --------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: David I. Backer is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies at West Chester University. He is the author of Althusser and Education Reassessing Critical Education (2022). He writes a weekly newsletter called Schooling in Socialist America. Panagiotis Sotiris (Chair and Discussant) teaches at Hellenic Open University and is an editor of Historical Materialism. He is the author of A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser (2020). Giacomo Clemente is a Research fellow at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He is the author of Sapere, ideologia, riproduzione: l’apparato scolastico in Louis Althusser e nella scuola althusseriana (2021) [Knowledge, Ideology, Reproduction: The Scholastic Apparatus in Louis Althusser and in the Althusserian School]. He is working on a monograph on linguistics by Michel Pêcheux. Roberto Mozzachiodi: is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, Visiting Lecturer at Regent’s University and an editor of Historical Materialism. He is the author of ‘The Difficulty of Being a Marxist in Philosophy’ in the current issue of Historical Materialism. He is a trade union activist in the education sector.