Teaching the Actuality of Revolution: Aesthetics, Unlearning, and the Sensations of Struggle

by Derek R Ford

Exploring the nexus between aesthetics, pedagogy, and politics illustrates the central role education plays in reproducing injustice and inhibiting confidence in revolutionary struggle. Demonstrating how capitalism and its attendant forms of oppression are not merely cognitive but perceptual, Derek R. Ford proposes that revolutionary education demands the production of aesthetic experiences through which we sense the possibility and actuality of alternative worlds. In response to this pressing task, Ford develops a praxis of teaching and a pedagogy of unlearning that, in our current conjuncture, creates conditions for encountering what Jennifer Ponce de León calls "an other aesthetics." Mapping contemporary capital as a perceptual ecology of structures, social relations, beliefs, and feelings, Teaching the Actuality of Revolution provides an extensive new set of concepts, practices, and readings for revolutionaries to better plan, enact, reflect on, and refine our organizing efforts.
"This book offers an expansive and inspiring examination of an issue crucially important to revolutionary practice and the struggles of all working class and oppressed how are humans' understanding and perception of the world forged through class struggle? In it, Derek Ford brilliantly illuminates key insights of Marx and Engels' work, as well as that of Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Paulo Freire, and many contemporary Marxist theorists. His far-reaching discussions of ideology, aesthetics, pedagogy, and the arts offer valuable tools for unlearning capital's perceptual ecology and forging new worlds of sense and perception that concretely contribute to the communist struggle." -Jennifer Ponce de León, author of Another Aesthetics Is Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War.
"Ford expertly wields a robust analysis of sensory perception and perceptual mapping against the dominant aesthetic ecological regime which reigns as an extension of the dictatorship of capital and which is reproduced, according to Ford, pedagogically. What emerges from this exploration is essential reading for educators, organizers, and anyone interested in (un)learning the ideology and imposed sensorium of capital and, ultimately, in teaching the actuality of revolution!" -Breht O'Shea, Revolutionary Left Radio

Genres: Theory, Education, Nonfiction

158 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2023

Reviews

[Brumaire Bodbyl-Mast · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly short, heavily theoretical and dense work which utilizes Althusser and the concept of “unlearning” quite heavily. More or less, Ford argues for a reconstruction of pedagogy around “pointing,” meaning the redirection by teachers to more critical thinking rather than basic “learning,” which means a traditional capitalist pedagogy, along say, the Prussian model, which though does to some extent bolster critical thinking- is done on the basis of productivity. The work is somewhat too theoretical for my tastes- I think greater discussions of the affects of debt or what have you on how education works would be welcome. However, I do understand Ford’s purpose is much more about the slow construction of different, better forms of thinking- that surpass even Lebrve’s arrhythmia, a goal I respect, and one I ultimately have trouble, given my more base reading capabilities and taste.

[Chris Why · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times verbose and disjointed, I really appreciated the project here overall of weaving together disparate revolutionary thinkers to make a case for re connecting Marxist thought to the movement, and specifically building on Freire's core ideas in an area I find is under theorized: namely that rupture of our everyday experience that creates the conditions for sensing and reinforcing our work to build a better world

[Connor Leavitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've written like 3 reviews of this book, it's a very difficult experience to describe.

If one reads this book expecting a guide for how peasants become a People's Army, or for organizing a vanguard-cadre party and ensuring that line struggle always orients itself toward greater revolutionary successes, one would be severely disappointed by Ford's at times excessive abstraction.

Very little in the book is concerned with practical activity, it's more concerned with how we think, perceive, and represent both the world we live in and the journey toward a better world that is possible. Ford summarizes in his conclusion, "pedagogy is an experience of the gaps in the world, of the past and future within the present, of the void between the ahistorical time of capital and the Historical time of revolution. Marxist politics is the project of assembling the forces to bridge that void."

While a lot of this text assists in pointing us toward the perceptual and aesthetic features of this process, the book doesnt sus out the practical activity that is perhaps more vital to the question, "what is to be done?" I suppose that book also already exists, but the implication of Ford's conclusion is that we are not yet at a historical conjuncture where the forces for a better world can be assembled, rather it can only be sensed.