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

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 people: 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 capitals 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 Possible: 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 OShea Revolutionary Left Radio