Capitalism, Race, and the Role of Schools in Social Transformation: A Response

The symposium in this issue circles around the power and limitations of Marxist and neo-Marxist theory to illuminate educational systems and problems. But what do we mean by “Marxism”? Marx was limited by his own context and time and European perspective. But subsequently, revolutionaries in Europe, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, and now Latin America revised and extended Marx’s thought in relation to their own conditions. It is outside Europe that the major theoretical innovations and experiments with socialism have taken place. Important work in areas of culture, subjectivity, race, gender, and space have further reworked and expanded, as well as contested, some of Marx’s insights. Michael Apple takes up this point in his warning against economic reductionist tendencies in Marxist scholarship in favor of multidimensional analyses that account for the interrelation of the economic, political, and cultural and inter-imbrications of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy.1