Back in April, I was discussant on a panel called “Marx, Education, Today.” This week I’m sending along my comments, or remarx, lol.

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The Meaning of ‘Marx’ in Education Today, or: X Marx the Spot

By David I. Backer

Discussant’s remarks for the “Marx, Education, Today” panel, AERA, 4/9/2026

Thank you to the presenters for these cutting edge contributions to Marxian analysis of schools society and education, brought to you by SIG 157. I want to tell a brief anecdote and pose a question to each of these papers, then give us some time to chat. 

After I finished my dissertation in New York City I taught a seminar on Marx and classroom dialogue. It was 2014, fall, and in the third week we studied Hegel and the fourth, Marx. I wanted to articulate to the students what the difference was. At that time there was a movement called Flood Wall Street, a kind of post-Occupy Wall Street formation that was trying to radicalize the People’s Climate March, getting the more timid marchers to swarm the area around the New York stock exchange. 

The city’s memory of Occupy was still fresh and perhaps the police were traumatized, so they set up barricades all around the financial district in advance of the Flood action. I’d been active in Occupy in 2011, and I’d learned so much from that movement, I thought of it as a classroom. (In fact, Myles Horton told Paulo Freire that learning in the movement is like an ocean whereas learning in a classroom is a drop.) 

So I told my students to meet me at one of the corners where they’d set up the barricades, a spot where the Flood organizers mentioned they might be that evening. The seminar met near Judson Church, and we walked over to one of the barricades. I said that whereas Hegel was all about spirit and logic and his dialectic was somewhat up in the clouds, abstract, Marx’s flipped that on its head and rendered the dialectic concrete. As I spoke, I grabbed a barricade and started shaking it back and forth, rocking the whole line of moveable metal fences until nearby police took notice and started heading our way. I stopped and said let’s walk around and talk about that materialist dialectic in education.

Foucault once got frustrated when he was asked if he was a Marxist, I think it was during a seminar, I can’t remember where. To the asker he asked back, “would you ask a physicist if they’re Einsteinian?” His response haunts me, because to speak of Marx today is to speak of the Bearded One, an ancestor, so influential that his work is constantly revisited and dissected for meaning by figures as diverse as Heydorn, Carnoy, Dussel, Adorno, Freire, and any number of others. 

Even the rejections, the extensions, the turns this way and that, the translations—all revere this person who wrote these words. The tributaries and waves of influence his words have had are tangled and difficult to parse, while, in a simple way, I think we all appreciate, critically or constructively, whether Marxist or Marxian or marxist (small m) or marxologist or post-marxist, the words’ power. See the perennial panics about cultural Marxism in the schools and books like the right wing scribbler James Lindsay’s The Marxification of Education, for which I’m still awaiting the Marxist review. ‘Marx’ means so much to so many. 

The X in Marx’s surname echoes this swarm of powerful meaning for me, the force of Marx’s words and the word Marx itself. The name is so cool, edgy, succinct, just four letters with that X at the end, a letter that indicates an open variable, a kind of complex challenge as to how in this moment today we make the words meaningful, but also something mathematically precise: here, now, this. As in X marks the spot. 

The papers on today’s panel have shown some directions the many Marxian tributaries have gone in education today: critical realism, ecopedagogy, Steffen, and negativity in decoloniality. The question I pose, going back to my seminar anecdote, is to what extent are these comments on Marx in education today bringing us to barricades? Where do these comments get us in the material dialectic, not just the abstract one with so much stuff in the head, but the metal the ruling class builds to keep capital in place? And how might educators in the expansive sense, by which I mean those—whomever they are, young or old, teacher or student, parent or child, citizen or official— devoted to bring (the root of the word educere) the social structure out to new moments through struggle, leading students in that same expansive sense, those still learning to change with the struggle, to the spot where the forces gather in the conjuncture?

We heard about:  

1. The critical reality of Mexican American subjectivity in school where structure meets agency 

2. Heydorn’s bildung, The broken cash register at the supermarket of capitalism, a fatal contradiction between raising consciousness 

3. Market reforms and their structural mediation, the ways that change is just more of the same, Carnoy’s structural approach

4. The planet and environmental violence illuminated by ecopedagogy, reading the word as the world as earth

5. The place where social antagonism disappears, where logics of absence and negativity disappear the struggle we experience everyday and the responsive negativities required 

Put simply, the X in Marx’s name must mark a sort of spot for studying and learning today, whether barricade or other barrier to change. What spots do these papers on Marx mark? Can we name places where each of these concepts can point us in the dialectic to intervene? What would they be?