Introduction: Revolutionary Feminist Praxis

It is now an intellectual and political habit for us to begin our writing with the assertion that the world is messy and chaotic. The more we open our essays with this statement, the messier the world gets. Millions of people are driven to the seas and through the deserts by wars, destruction, dispossession and displacement. Aspirations to live free of violence are difficult to realize in the context of the vast, persistent and growing inequities of Europe and North America, compounded by increasingly reactionary and racist violence on the part of the state and civil society against forcibly displaced people. The persistence of this material condition is utterly dependent on the ideologies of patriarchal, racist capitalist social relations. Under the global expression of racialized patriarchy, violence has increased exponentially, taking on a massified character and regularly reported around the world: the rape to death of women in public, including by military, paramilitary and extremist forces; their abduction and selling in the sex market; the enforcement of child marriage; sexual abuse and assault from refugee camps to university campuses; arrest and imprisonment of Palestinian girls and women for their resistance to occupation; the detainment of Kurdish women activists in Turkey; the missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada; the murder of women on the US-Mexico Border; girls kidnapped across Africa; and religious forms of terrorism against women's reproductive autonomy. These are breath-taking atrocities committed every day and night by patriarchal forces of capitalism, imperialism and fundamentalisms. As Bannerji argues, 'the very content of the word "human" is being emptied out and filled with screams of agony of those condemned to it. In this atmosphere of violence how can violence against women not intensify, almost as an excrescence of this ordered disorder?' (2016, p. 17).

In order to address not only these forms of violence and degradation, but also the continuing contradictions of patriarchal, racist capitalism, we argue that we need to revolutionize our thinking around learning and the critical education project. We consider this endeavour to be our contribution as revolutionary feminist scholars of education. By revolutionize, we do not simply mean change: we need to fully embrace the revolutionary potential of learning and pedagogical work and engage with our history of scholarship through the imperative of generating revolutionary feminist praxis. By praxis we mean, following Allman's dialectical articulation, 'a concept that grasps the internal relation between consciousness and sensuous human experience, a unity of opposites that reciprocally shape and determine one another' (2007, p. 79, emphasis in original). We explore this dialectical iteration of praxis through this text. It is our contention – and we would argue these claims can easily be seen in the last three decades of debate – that critical education is plagued by persistent theoretical and political inconsistencies. Following significant articulations of the relation between education and social reproduction, the field of critical education has been unable to contend with the growing complexity of both the material condition of the world and the ideological apparatus of bourgeois society in the academy. As argued by key Marxist scholars of education, including Paula Allman, Wayne Au, Noah De Lissovoy, Teresa Ebert, Sandy Grande, John Holst and Glenn Rikowski, critical education theory suffers from several important inconsistencies and reformist tendencies. The influence of a non-dialectical reading of Marx under conditions of patriarchy and racism continues to produce substantial errors in scholarship, including: the inability to understand class and labour power as relations and processes; a causal and deterministic articulation of consciousness and praxis as external relations; culturalist and identity-based approaches to 'difference' that cannot illuminate inter-constitutive social relations; confusion over the relationality between colonialism, fundamentalisms, imperialism and neoliberalism within capitalism; and the continued marginalization of feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial scholarship within the academy. This position has left critical education theory stuck in economistic, reformist and culturalist cycles, unable to contend with the aggressive tendencies of both liberalism and the veiled bourgeois project of postand identity theories. Or, as Bannerji has argued in a discussion of her own feminist praxis, we see a clear need to overcome 'a binary and inverse relationship between "class" and "culture", or "discourse" and "social relations", structure and forms of consciousness, which seems to pervade our intellectual world' (2001, p. 9).

This book is both a collection of previous work and a reflection on our own struggle to understand 'revolutionary learning'. It includes pieces informed by multiple conversations with different scholars over the last ten years. This reading is deeply influenced by Paula Allman's theorization of consciousness and praxis (1999, 2001, 2007), the epistemological work of Dorothy E. Smith (1988, 1990, 1999, 2011), and Himani Bannerji's Marxist feminist theorization of race, gender and class (1995, 2000, 2001, 2011, 2015, 2016). The text represents an ongoing engagement with the deepening of our theoretical and empirical work around the question of consciousness and praxis in educational theory and is informed by our intellectual and political praxis in feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. Over the years, this engagement has resulted in extensive writing, both published and unpublished, and this process has helped us deepen our grasp of the theoretical tools necessary to make sense of the relations of ruling. This includes consciousness and praxis, but also the concepts of learning, education, experience, community, reform, revolution, social relations, dialectics, racism, colonialism, materialism and patriarchy, among others. In each chapter, we endeavour to get closer to the key concepts we need to understand. As such, conceptually there is some overlap between the chapters, but they are a record and reflection of our own struggle to learn and to sharpen our understanding of both the theorization and the political implications of this body of work.

We see this book as both continuing and extending the argument offered by Paula Allman. As such, we use her work extensively, but also try to expand her analysis into domains of racialized, patriarchal capitalism. We also intend to follow her thesis that Marx's theory of consciousness and praxis is the most important theoretical core of...