Post-marxism, humanism and (post)structuralism: Educational philosophy and theory

Introduction

Western Marxism, since its Western deviation and theoretical development in the 1920s, developed in diverse ways that has reflected the broader philosophical environment. First, a theory of consciousness and alienation based on innovative readings of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1967) beginning in the 1930s was highly significant alongside the rediscovery and publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in English for the first time in 1959. Jean Wahl, inspired by Bergson and Brunschvicg, looked to Heidegger and to Hegel and his 1929 Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel often translated as ‘unhappy consciousness’ began a distinctively French interpretation of the master/slave dialectic. Alexandre Kojève, lectures at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1933 to 1939 reached a small group of intellectuals including Breton, Lacan, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Aron and others, and had a strong influence on poststructuralist thinking. In the same vein Jean Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind encouraged a view that related to the Logic. The French Hegel renaissance lead to a humanist interpretation concerning the emancipation of humanity.

Second, the influence of European phenomenology largely stemming from work by Husserl and Heidegger had a huge influence on French philosophy, and more particularly, on French existentialism under Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebrve and others. In 1946 Sartre proclaimed Existentialism is a Humanism asserting the idea that ‘existence precedes essence’ – a reversal of various Christian versions – to announce that the individual is defined by the choices they make, fashioning themselves and realizing their responsibility not only for themselves but for humanity.

Third, the structuralist revolution beginning in Russian formalism and signaling the fundamental significance of the ‘linguistic turn’ in semiotics developed by Jacobson and Saussure (and differently by Wittgenstein and Peirce) was applied by Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Althusser and the early Foucault experimented with a replacement for the dialectic. Finally, in this same genealogical strand, the inception of Nietzschean Marxism, that swapped Nietzsche (and Spinoza) for Hegel, by thinkers as diverse as Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault. Heidegger’s (1947) ‘Letter on Humanism’ was a response to Sartre’s (1946) Existentialism is a Humanism that indicated how his philosophy of Being differed from various humanisms Christian and Marxist; and prefigured new forms of contemporary posthumanism. The Situationists on the basis of a Freudo-Marxist model worked to bring about an avant-garde revolution in art in the 1960s drawing on Dadaism and Surrealism. Guy Debord’s 1967 The Society of the Spectacle referred to mass media and applied Marx’s notions of the fetishism of commodities and alienation. The Report on the Construction of Situations published in 1957 expressed a revolutionary movement concerned for the imbecilization of young people in families and schools.

In Germany, Critical Theory developed a form of Marxism that focused on unmasking ideology; in Italy, the Autonomist tradition (Tronti, Negri and others) emphasized the capacity of the working class to create change and challenge the capitalism system from the bottom-up; in Britain, a form of Marxism that took the form of Cultural Studies developed alongside the cultural thinking of the New Left, Gramscian, Althusserian and Political Economy schools with an accent on ideology studies, national and class formations and their intersections with ethnicity, gender and sexuality.

The term Post-Marxism originated with Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and can be read back on movements that challenged the essentialist and humanist strand of classical Marxism driven by various forms of determinism and reductionism to register the influence of Althusserianism and poststructuralist/postmodernist accounts that rejected the base/superstructure model to see culture and ideology as relatively independent of the economic base. It embraced multiple subject-positions based on genealogical analysis of the philosophical subject and its critique of liberal autonomy. Based on The Essex School of discourse analysis based on Laclau's work relied on poststructuralist and psychoanalytic notions of Lacan, Foucault and Derrida in a mix of Saussurean linguistics, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction became the central feature of the Ideology and Discourse Analysis graduate program at the University of Essex in the 1980s.

Heidegger and the fate of western humanism (Michael A Peters, Beijing Normal University)

Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism (Über den Humanismus) was written in 1946 and published a year later in response to Jean Beaufret’s question: Comment redonner un sens au mot 'Humanisme' (How do we restore meaning to the word ‘humanism’)? (Heidegger, 1978, p. 195). Both the question and Heidegger’s answer is a response to Sartre’s (1946) Existentialism is a Humanism wherein he argued: ‘Man possesses human nature … which is found in every man …which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception…’¹ Famously, he argues ‘existence precedes essence’ meaning the individual defines their existence through their choices and must bear responsibility for their free-choice and actions. By contrast, Heidegger argues that humanism is based on metaphysics that gives humanity a universal essence that takes consciousness as the hallmark, leading to subjectivism and idealism and must be dismantled. Heidegger wishes to ground metaphysics in Being, a more originary form which is given to man who becomes the becomes ‘the shepherd of Being.’

The Western concept of man has been presented in education in the form humanistic essentialism based on Kant’s notion of autonomy but humanism remains metaphysical because it does not inquire into of the relation of being to the essence of the human being. Heidegger argues the ‘essence’ of the human being—lies in his ek-sistence’ the key to which is language, the ‘house of being’. Heidegger (1978) puts it this way: ‘Every humanism is either grounded in metaphysics or makes itself the ground of some metaphysics. Every determination of the essence of man that already presupposes a reading of being, without the question of the truth of being–be it intentionally or unintentionally–is metaphysical. It therefore appears, and precisely with respect to the manner in which the essence of man is determined, that what is peculiarity to all metaphysics is that it is humanistic. Accordingly, every humanism is metaphysical.’ The first humanism, Heidegger argues, is Roman based on Greek ideals of paideia that the Romans translated as humanitas, focussed on meditation and caring for the essence of being. Hegel's interpretation of history as the unwinding of ‘spirit’ is ‘not untrue’ and the inversion of Hegel in Marx and Nietzsche, ‘belongs to the history of the truth of being’. Nietzsche’s observes that the nihilism after ‘the death of God’ is replaced by the figure and fiction of Man imbued with consciousness, autonomy and free will, releasing a full-blown philosophical anthropology of modern humanism. The roots of what Marx had learned from Hegel to recognize in an essential and meaningful sense as man's alienation go back to the ‘homelessness’ of modern man. Accordingly, ‘Marx enters into an essential dimension of history as he discovers this alienation, for that reason the Marxist view of history is superior to other history.’

The Neo-Hegelian revival that took place at the hands of Bradley in England, Croce in Italy and Dilthey in Germany, became a renaissance in French thought (Bohm & Mudimbe, 1994) with Wahl’s ‘unhappy conscience’, Kojève, who attempted to harmonise Hegel and Heidegger, and Hyppolite who provided a powerful humanistic interpretation of the Phenomenology that focused on the figure of alienation, and exercised a strong influence on the next generation of philosophers including phenomenologists, existentialists and critical theorists (Adorno, Marcuse) but also those who like Althusser, Lacan Levi-Strauss, Foucault and Derrida, later rejected Hegelian humanism on the basis of structuralist and Nietzschean-inspired innovations.

From Nietzsche’s dream of the Übermensch, the Overman a super-human being who can strike his own values to give life meaning on earth, to Heidegger’s grand narrative of the history of being and the relation to spiritual humanitas, an influential mainspring of humanism in Europe gets founded and at the same time is discovered to be infected, contaminated and compromised by the association with Nazism. In particular, Heidegger’s tracing of the history of being that celebrates a pure genealogical relationship of Germany to Greece is tainted with Heidegger’s hidden anti-Semitism that impugns ‘world Judaism’ which he sees as a threat to the German homeland. The ideological nature of humanism that Heidegger reveals is not to be rescued by an account of the history of being that hides a hideous and systematic exclusion of the Jewish people that runs deep in the corpus of Heidegger’s philosophy. It is a history of being that reifies the German language and ‘fatherland’ by tracing its primordial connection to Greek ideals but turns out to be based on a systematic racial exclusion that has become more apparent over time.

Althusser’s structuralist reading by-passed the humanism of the early of Marx, influenced by Feuerbach, to emphasise the scientific endeavour to understand the structures of bourgeoise society. Derrida’s (1982) reading of Heidegger (‘The Ends of Man’, 1968) to reconcile, preserve and ‘save’ Heidegger’s appeal to the higher humanity of humanitas, became increasingly problematic after Bourdieu’s (1991, orig. 1975) and Farías’s (1989) reassessment of the philosophical intransigence of Heidegger’s Nazi engagement that was seen as integral to his philosophy rather than a phase. Heidegger’s (2014–2020) Black Notebooks, to date some ten editions, reveals the extent and systematicity of his anti-Semitism. Peter Trawny, the editor of those notebooks, offers a crushing evaluation of Heidegger’s philosophical project in light of the Black Notebooks. In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy Trawny (2016) he reveals the extent to which Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is rooted in the history of being.

Michel Foucault route and relation to Heidegger is very different because Foucault remained a resolute historicist in his thinking and while he says ‘My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger” (1988, p. 250) what he means is that from Heidegger, whom he historicises, he learns the relationship of the subject to truth that he investigates in terms of historical epistemes or regimes constituted by different cultural practices. Thus, for instance, he contrasts the constitution of human subjectivity in the context of the history of sexual practices in the ancient world, governed largely by ascetic practices and spiritual exercise in care for the self, with the values of early monastic Christianity where ascetic practices are linked to the avoidance of sin and the truth involved with self-renunciation. It seems likely that Foucault learned a great deal from Heidegger’s Nietzsche. Foucault’s history of the subject enables Foucault to historicise both Heidegger and Kant embracing a form of living humanism based on ‘the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy’ that he takes to be ‘the heart of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 44).

Althusser on humanist Marxism David Neilson, University of Waikato

‘Humanist Marxists’ have been largely sidelined by Althusser’s ‘anti-humanist’ position that continues to be a dominant feature of both contemporary western Marxism and ‘post-Marxism’. Althusser’s theory of a strong ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s works separates the early work that he equates with humanism, which is dismissed, from the ‘anti-humanist’ mature work that is celebrated. In particular, Althusser dismisses the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and thesis eleven that he categorizes as Hegelian, non-scientific humanism. In contrast, he views the mature work epitomized by Capital Vol. 1 as being purged of the early Hegelian residue and instead being the self-contained epitome of Marx’s Marxism that represents a new anti-humanist science because it identifies a process without a subject (Althusser, 1969, 1970, 1976).

The relation between the broader debate between humanist and anti-humanist positions and the specific debate within Marxism and post-Marxism uniquely places Althusser.

However, Althusser makes a grave mistake by simply transferring the broader distinction between ‘humanist’ and ‘anti-humanist’ positions on to the distinction between Marx’s early and mature works. In fact, Althusser’s intervention into Marxism brings with it the baggage of his mainstream non-Marxist influences. His mainstream idea of western science as without a subject and the idea of a clean epistemological break resonate with the perspective of his teacher Gaston Bachelard. Similarly, Althusser’s intellectual heritage that relates to the highly influential humanism/anti-humanism dichotomy that has grounding the famous debates between Sartre and Heidegger in 1945 is simply transferred on to Marx.

These external modes of thinking that Althusser stamps on to Marx’s writings do clear ‘epistemic violence’ to Marx’s thinking. Rather than read Marx through the lens of external classificatory yardsticks that make mutually exclusive distinctions; it is fundamental to read Marx on his own terms. That is, Althusser’s theory of the ‘epistemological break’ stems from mainstream non-Marxist influences rather than from a close reading of Marx’s works from which we can infer Marx’s own position. That is, the distinction between humanism and anti-humanism that characterizes the broader philosophical debate does not correspond with the mutually exclusive distinction that Althusser makes between Marx’s early and mature writing. These clean distinctions across Marx’s writings and impositions on to Marx’s work of mainstream distinctions are untenable at scrutiny. Rather than a hard break, a close reading of Marx’s writings reveals a high level of epistemological consistency between the young and mature writings.

Marx’s post-doctoral years especially beginning with the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (EPM) and concluding with the Communist Manifesto, represent a series of soft breaks with Hegel’s philosophy and the outline of the key developing themes of Marx’s Marxism. Althusser, reflecting the mainstream debate, equates the early work with Hegel’s mystical idealism. On scrutiny, this view does deep epistemic violence to the EPM where in the third manuscript Marx decisively breaks with Hegel’s philosophy. According to Marx, Hegel is lost in the realm of pure thought that he abstracts from the real material world. In contrast, Marx argues that human consciousness is always in relation to a real material world of which humanity, defined as a physical, sensuous, natural, sentient species, is an integral part. The EPM thus represents Marx’s fundamental break with Hegel and integrally that humanity should be treated as a natural physical being, not as a metaphysical ideal construct. In addition, rather than denying the distinction between ‘being and human being’, Marx argues that the distinctions between human thought, humanity’s natural material being, and the external (to humanity) material world are key elements of an interactive holistic natural process.

Further, Marx’s discussion of alienation that inversely views humans as creative social beings cannot be dismissed conveniently as a radical variation of what Marx himself called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ that refers to an ideological mythical human essence that falsely explains in order to justify prevailing forms of society including ideologically prevailing forms of social consciousness. Rather, Marx’s project is to demonstrate the various ways that prevailing forms of social consciousness are consequences of the ways that modes of production meet or do not meet our material needs. That is, fundamentally, the EPM is an account of class modes of exploiation are ways of life that subordinate the laboring population to alien powers that take control of the basic necessary elements of human life. This view is also fundamental to the Communist Manifesto prognosis. Here, Marx transitions from a philosophical mode of reasoning to a Sociological reading that grasps and applies the German Ideology insight that ‘consciousness is a social product’. However, the Communist Manifesto does not treat the proletariat as without natural human needs. The underlying drive of the proletariat that actively responds against the capitalist mode of production and that culminates in the proletariat becoming a class-for-itself occurs because its fundamental life circumstances defined by capitalist relations of production conflict with its human material needs.

Similarly, the section in the EPM on ‘estranged labour’ clearly outlines the key themes of Marx’s critical political economy that he examines in detail in Capital Vol. 1 (Comninel 2019). Further, identification of a process without a subject that Althusser claims is why Capital Vol. 1 epitomizes Marx’s new science and the early work should be in the dustbin of history, fails to grasp that in the Preface, in a reference to the methodological introduction of the Grundrisse, Marx states that Capital Vol. 1 is an ‘abstract’ account. That is, it methodologically focuses on the logic of capitalism and thus abstracts out the causal capacity of humanity to intervene and make history who are treated as simply and only the un-self-conscious agents of a structural process. However, from the initial breakthrough writing of the third manuscript of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, to ‘thesis 11′, to the Communist Manifesto, to the opening paragraph of the 18^th Brumaire, to the bees and architect tale in Capital Vol. 1, Marx demonstrates his attachment to the view that humanity is not just a an object of history. The human subject understood as a physical being with needs that are similar but different from other sentient beings on this earth because of the former's capacity to creatively design before doing. This is the message of the ‘bees and architect’ tale in Capital Vol. 1 that clearly resonates with Marx’s original statement of praxis in thesis 11, that the ‘point of [knowledge] is to change the [world].

The present crisis of Marxism actually stems from the spectre of Althusser whose reading of Marx has removed agency, humanity, and knowledge from Marxism and in so doing has relegated Marxism to the sidelines of history.

Poststructuralist marxisms

Michael A Peters, Being Normal University, PR China

In 2003 I argued for a conception of ‘poststructuralist Marxisms’ examining the work of French philosophers – Jacques Derrida’s (1993) Spectres of Marx, Deleuze and Guattari (1977, 1987) two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s (1979) The Postmodern Condition, and Michael Foucault’s (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics (Peters, 2003). Each of these philosophers had engaged with Marx and saw their own work in part or whole as a means for critically receiving Marx or going beyond him. I suggested that ‘poststructuralist Marxism was the pedagogical practice of reading and rereading Marx in a critical manner, less concerned to give an account of social class or of the changing historical relevance of this concept in relation to education than to argue for the continued relevance of Marx and Marxism, especially in relation to what shall be called ‘knowledge capitalism’. I discussed the concept of the social in the post-modern condition before reviewing the relations between post-structuralism and Marxism, and giving responses to the crisis of Marxism. I argued poststructuralism, is neither anti-structuralist nor anti-Marxist. I provides an account of Deleuze's Marxism (libidinal materialism), using it to analyse education as a form of ‘knowledge capitalism’. This is not a surprising thesis: Derrida and Foucault were students of Althusser; Deleuze and Guattari were self-confessed Marxists – Deleuze was writing The Grandeur of Marx when he died; Lyotard was a member of the Socialism or Barbarism, a French radical Left group before he wrote his so-called post-Marxist work; and Foucault’s work was for me the basis of a critique of neoliberal capitalism (Peters, 2007) and often interpreted in relation to Marx (Olssen, 2003; Springer, 2012). It was a theme that I amplified in relation to Lyotard (Peters, 2004). Part of my fascination with Lyotard was how he used the philosophy of language-games of Wittgenstein to do critical work with regard to knowledge capitalism and a critique of the concept of the knowledge economy. I noted how his work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) originally published in Paris in 1979, that became an instant cause célèbre, crystallised an original interpretation a study of the status and development of knowledge, science and technology in advanced capitalist societies. It developed a philosophical interpretation of the changing state of knowledge, science and education in the most highly developed societies, reviewing and synthesising research on contemporary science within the broader context of the sociology of postindustrial society and studies of postmodern culture. I had edited Education and the Postmodern Condition (Peters, 1995) for which Lyotard wrote a brief Preface. I suggest that the translation of Lyotard's work into English in 1984 marked an important stage in the globalization of the modernity/postmodernity debate involving the central thinkers of the late 20th century. This work was based on an earlier attempt to theorise the connections in Poststructuralism, Marxism, and Neoliberalism: Between Theory and Politics (Peters, 2001). The book was an introduction to the politics of poststructuralism focusing on two interrelated themes: the culture of Western Marxism and contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Poststructuralism is not a form of anti-Marxism; indeed, poststructuralist philosophers view themselves in some kind of relationship to the legacy of Marx. Either they have been Marxist or still view themselves as Marxist. In a post-Marxist era they have invented new ways of reading and writing Marx. I critically engaged with neoliberalism as an ideology that is committed to the revitalization of homo economicus and neoclassical economics. Later I embraced Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’ and followed his interpretation of the birth of neoliberalism, using Foucault's concept in relation to the field of education where it has a natural home given that much educational theory and practice in the liberal tradition at least since Kant has been directed at the goals of autonomy and self-government (Peters et al., 2009).

Poststructuralist marxisms: Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard, and Hardt and Negri

Liz Jackson, The Education University of Hong Kong

In line with Peters’ (2003) conceptualisation, poststructuralist Marxism has now become a shorthand term to categorise the works of a range of French thinkers that address Marx or stand in the light of Marxism, from a poststructuralist position (Peters & Jackson, 2020). Peters (2001) describes Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983) as key moment of French poststructuralism, as his interpretation of Nietzsche provides for an understanding of difference at odds with a Hegelian dialectic. Later, Deleuze and Guattari published the influential Capitalism and Schizophrenia in two volumes (in 1972 and 1980). The work aims at a materialist, universal history that extends beyond Marx and Freud (Peters, 2001). Since then, Deleuze has maintained his position as a Marxist, arguing that the critique of capitalism in political philosophy is essential, and must include within it Marx’s insight that capitalism as a system functions to self-correct and manage its essential limitations. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987) Deleuze and Guattari further argue that capitalism should be defined by its positioning and constructing of minorities, while ‘war machines’ are created for ‘occupying, taking up, space-time, or inventing new space-times’ (p. 172). In relation, Deleuze has argued that a Leftist political position has little to do with particular governments and their policies, but is a phenomenon where one is oriented toward the third world and ‘a worn-out justice system that helps us to accommodate’ the reality of mass hunger, disease, and starvation worldwide (Peters, 2001). In relation, he expressed disdain for revolutionary politics that assumes that revolutions have commonly led to victories for humanity and justice, as the same predicaments of mass injustice and class struggle remain over time, even in countries which had popular revolutions.

Derrida expressed in 1972 that he was sympathetic to Marxism, but that Marx’s texts and Marxism should not be seen as ‘finished elaborations’ as he personally found them unsatisfying (Peters, 2001). In his Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993), Derrida seeks to elaborate a Marxist view not of communism but of a philosophy of responsibility and radical critique. Like Deleuze, he noted that a triumphalist discourse had emerged in the west at the apparent success of capitalism, which turned a blind eye to neoliberalism developments. As he writes,

it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity.

Derrida goes on to elaborate ten plagues of capitalism, arguing that unemployment, debt, and trade must be reconceptualised from a modernist rendering to account for the way they are experienced as violent and repressive forces in the contemporary world. Peters (2001) provides a strong critique of western critics of Derrida (such as Rorty, 1991) who suggest that his deconstruction of modern western ideology results in a depoliticised philosophy, given Derrida’s strong views about society.

Like Derrida, Lyotard is primarily known for his poststructuralist, deconstructive work, such as his widely influential The Postmodern Condition (1979), while his work focused on political economy has been largely overlooked by his critics. Lyotard grappled with Marxism and its impacts in philosophy and in society over the course of his life. Identifying early in his career as Marxist, he also noted the new realities the tradition faced given ‘the reorganization of capitalism into bureaucratic or State monopolistic capitalism; the role of the modern state in the so-called mixed economy…the mentality of workers and employees; the effects of economic growth on daily life and culture’, and more (2006, p. 246). For Lyotard, it was vital to question and analyse the rationalisation and logic of performance underpinning global capitalism, precluding any merely political solutions to its ills, such as emancipation or salvation (Peters, 2006).

Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) is also informed significantly by Marxism, focusing primarily on the place of the multitude, the collective subject, against the Empire, the emerging global system of domination. As they describe the relationship between the two, they note the Empire is ‘as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living’ (2000, p. 62). Their account is indebted to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics as well as the Italian tradition of operaismo, of the ‘inversion of struggles’ that sees the agents of capitalism as struggling and grappling against the force of the global working masses (Bourassa & Slater, 2020; Tronti, 2019). In a sense this perspective is more hopeful than that of others, in identifying and affirming workers as active, powerful agents, rather than passive victims of the increasingly complicated yet opaque global economy. Negri has related reflected that the separation of work from humans can be ‘a stepping stone for our separation from capital’ admitting this possibility is an ‘almost utopian instinct’ (Means et al., 2020).

Knowledge socialism

Michael A Peters, Beijing Normal University, PR China

‘Knowledge socialism’ (KS) is a concept and practice that depends on the rise of peer production and, in particular, the emergence of different modes of openness concerning collegiality, collaboration, and collective intelligence that have become increasingly evident in ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Peters & Bulut, 2011). Contrasted with knowledge capitalism and the neoliberal knowledge economy based on human capital theory and the paradigm of intellectual property, knowledge socialism focuses on modes of openness in science, education, and publishing that thrive within knowledge capitalism by resisting the pay-wall and stressing the open and public nature of collaborative academic activity. It is a theoretical approach in radical political economy that draws on the discourse of ‘cognitive capitalism’ based on Marx’s ‘Fragment of Machines’ that developed with the autonomist school in Italy under Negri, Virno and Lazzarato, and has clear implications for marrying Marx and Foucault in the field of education by focusing on the question of immaterial (digital) labour. I draw attention to features of knowledge (or algorithmic) capitalism in ‘the epoch of digital reason’ (Peters, 2017) and, in particular, examine the critical relationship between ‘deep learning’ and what is called ‘technological unemployment’ (Peters et al., 2019). The infinite substitution of labour is the driving motif of the transformation of labour in the shift from industrial to postindustrial forms of capitalism with its waves of automation based on robotization. ‘Deep learning’ is the key process in the transformation of knowledge into data and information, and; machine learning can augment and replace human knowledge production systems with algorithms, large data sets and data-intensive science. The infinite substitution principle of labour applied to mechanised assembly plants and later 24/7 ‘intelligent’ manufacturing, duplicates the process for mental labour especially in the digital realm (Wei & Peters, 2019). Automation and the generalised ‘decline of labour’ pose huge questions for education, labor politics, unions, and welfare. Capital no longer needs labour in the way it required the mass of unskilled labour, even at offshore cheap rates, that characterised early stages of industrial capitalism or its globalisation in the post-war period as jobs migrated East. Second-wave automation of the service sector began in the 1980s when white collar office jobs began disappearing and the ATM machine was first introduced in 1969 as part of the early process of financialization. The digitisation of finance led to the automation of equity markets and the phenomenon of high-frequency trading represented a third-wave automation associated with global finance capitalism in the early 2000s (Peters et al., 2015). The fourth-wave automation of knowledge and research developed quickly with the growth of ‘platform capitalism,’ the rise of algorithmic-based knowledge capitalism and the rise of global search engines, big publishing and the metrics industries (Peters, 2016). Deep learning as an aspect of AI is the latest phase of automation that has the capacity to automate and augment human cognition, knowledge and research. Cognitive capitalism offers an alternative and opposing account of knowledge economy, and the notion of ‘creative labour’ provides an interesting alternative description to ‘human capital’. The wider philosophy and political economy of openness and ‘open knowledge production’ with a strong emphasis on ‘radical openness’ (Peters, 2013) and new forms of ‘co(labor)ation’ provides a clear direction (Peters, 2020; Peters & Jandric, 2015). In the era of 5 G networks, there are still opportunities for full public knowledge, learning and publishing platforms that are, if not owned or subsidised by the State, at least strongly regulated in the interests of public good science, although it is not clear how long this will remain the case.

Michael A. Peters
Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China
[email protected]http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1482-2975

David Neilson
Sociology and Social Policy Programme, Faculty of Social Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

Liz Jackson
Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Editor’s Note

This collective writing project is directed towards the diversity of forms of Post-Marxism, their relevance, and their relation to the ideology of humanism based on various including Post-Marxism and Anti-Humanism, Heidegger and the Fate of Western Humanism, Sartre’s (1946) Existentialism is a Humanism, Althusser on Humanist Marxism, The Situationists. The Italian Autonomist Tradition, Antonio Negri, Hardt and Negri, Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies, Laclau and Mouffe and other topics.

As Editor of EPAT I am interested in other collective writing proposals that focus on the theme of Post-Marxism and their relation to educational theory. Please send proposals to [email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm