In this essay, music education is conceptualized as a game or performance within The Game, the "pervasive atmosphere" (Fisher 2009) of neoliberal capitalism, which inevitably shapes scholarship, practice, and policy. Even people who strive to see music education for what it really might be (e.g., those researching and promoting social…

In this paper I explore social justice and equity research in music education through the lens of capitalist realism and accompanying concepts. I look at Fisher's ideas on hauntology and its connection to classical liberalism and neoliberalism. Fisher noted how some electronic music and pop music of the early 21st century is structured by…

In this article, I reflect on how my positioning along axes of disability, race, and class shapes my interaction with dominant discourses of motherhood and on how these tensions are explored in "The Mother," a public installation of my artwork shown in 2023. Situating myself in the liminal space between participation in and resistance to…

Materialist approaches to aesthetics historicize our sensuous capacities, orientations, and objects by attending to their ongoing production. This article begins by articulating capital not as an "economic" system but as a broader perceptual ecology that produces particular correspondences between subjects and the world. In response to…

In this paper, we connect with Martin Thrupp's calls for class-based analysis in education policy by problematising the absence of social class in the refreshed New Zealand curriculum, "Te Mataiaho" (2023). To contextualise this absence, we locate this curriculum policy in a historical perspective and interpret its 'identity turn' as an…

We explore social justice advocacy and education from the vantage point of elite theory as articulated in the works of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. Elite theory is applied here to re-appraise the explicit and implicit educational means and ends inspired by contemporary social justice along three inter-related dimensions: the place of…

In this article, we posit a Marxist critique of the way that neoliberal capitalism has thwarted the possibility of comprehensive education. We begin with an explanation of the unique productive capacity of human labour, and the centrality of labour power for capitalism. We go on to show the importance of the education system for continually…

The antagonism between "class" and "race" have plagued educational theory for decades. As a communist organizer seeking to move Marxist educational theory out of the stagnant waters of theoretical debates, I turn to recent CRT scholarship, which I find much more in line with the communist project. Yet, this literature omits…

In this essay, I articulate the value of understanding antiracism from a materialist perspective, drawing from the concept of racial capitalism. I critique the lack of accounting for race in class-first paradigms of critical scholarship in music education, arguing that racial hierarchy laid the foundation for capitalist exploitation through…

The Bolivian Marxist René Zavaleta (1937-1984) is considered Bolivia's most notable political thinker of the 20th century, an eminent figure in Latin American Marxism, since he produced critical thought anchored in the concrete history of our societies, and developed a set of theoretical and conceptual approaches relevant to understanding the…

What might an anti-capitalist education look like? To address this question, we examine the curricular visions of 56 elementary school teachers in New York City, who were asked to design one lesson on the issue of social class and economic inequality. Grounded in neoliberal racial capitalism and critical geography, our analysis finds that teachers…

This article explores how Third Way policies have weakened class consciousness in education and how a Marxist model of education offers a powerful alternative to this weakening. By blending neoliberal approaches with social democracy, the Third Way promotes individualistic and market-oriented reforms in education, which have been found to deepen…

This paper offers a critical examination of ethical consumption, exploring how it reinforces social identities within the capitalist framework. It argues for the crucial role of educational institutions in addressing ethical consumption within their curricula. While ethical consumption is often promoted for its moral virtues and its potential to…

This paper explores how girls' education developed in Norway and Prussia (and later North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW) during the first and second wave of women's political mobilisation. It analyses how organisations and activists of the women's movement were included in different cross-interest coalitions in education politics. The cases are…

In this article I examine and analyse: 1. Marxist analysis of Social Class; 2, Late Western Capitalism, it's economic class war from above; 3. Fascism, Pre-Emptive -Fascism/ Neo-Fascism; 4. Repression by and Resistance to Capital(ism); 5, Marxist analysis, program and strategy regarding Capitalism and Resistance. Here, I stress that revolutionary…