Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect

"Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect provides crucial suggestions for creating a 'new' public. The creatively and innovatively surprising argument generatively builds on Marxist theory and practice, and will be indispensable for adequately approaching the contemporary situation and redressing the problems generated by the contemporary capitalistic knowledge economy."
—Ryom Munsong, Associate Professor of Faculty of Foreign Languages, Korea University (in Tokyo) and Vice Chief, Research Team on Contemporary Korean Studies at the Center for Korean Studies.

"One would have to be truly stupid to enjoy this book, as it has no value whatsoever! Derek R. Ford has written a book with a surprisingly subversive thesis that demands an equally surprising endorsement. If the left is to challenge the knowledge economy, it must recognize the collective power of stupidity as a refusal to instrumentalize, measure, and thus commodify education in the name of capitalist value production. Drawing on a wide variety of sources ranging from Karl Marx to Édouard Glissant and others, Ford produces a unique genealogy of stupefying pedagogies that enable social movements to claim the opacity and incomprehensibility of stupidity as resistant to the ignorance and arrogance of educators on the right and the left."
—Tyson E. Lewis, Professor of Art Education, University of North Texas, USA.

This book is the first to articulate and challenge the consensus on the right and left that knowledge is the key to any problem, demonstrating how the left’s embrace of knowledge productivity keeps it trapped within capital’s circuits. As the knowledge economy has forced questions of education to the forefront, the book engages pedagogy as an underlying yet neglected motor of capitalism and its forms of oppression. Most importantly, it assembles new pedagogical resources for responding to the range of injustices that permeate our world. Building on yet critiquing the Marxist notion of the general intellect, Derek R. Ford theorizes stupidity as a necessary alternative pedagogical logic, an anti-value that is infinitely mute and unproductive.

Derek R. Ford is Assistant Professor of Education Studies at DePauw University, USA. He’s published five monographs and six edited volumes. Among other projects, Ford is also the editor of LiberationSchool.org.