Abstract

This paper is a reply to an article written by Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski ‘In Against and Beyond: a Marxist Critique of Higher Education’ that was published in the journal Social Epistemology in 2019. The paper argues that the article by Szadkowski and Krzeski is a significant contribution to critical higher education studies, providing a Marxist sensibility to the study of higher education policy and practice in the UK. However, the approach does not fully escape the confines of bourgeois social theory because of its commitment to the concept of labour as the revolutionary subject, and, therefore, that Szadkowski and Krzeski fail to fully substantiate the dynamic interaction: chain reaction, needing to blast the social world into a communist continuum. Taking its lead from a version of Marx’s social theory known as ‘ a new reading of Marx’, the paper sets out how the basis of capitalism’s contradiction and crisis lies not in the conflict between capital and labour, but rather, through the struggles that emerge from what Marx sets out as the value-form of capitalist social relations. The paper a demonstrates how the notion of ‘perspective’ offered by the authors as a viewpoint through which to analyse the capitalist life world is a bourgeois frame of reference and contrary to what the authors claim as an immanent critique.