Introduction: discovering and negotiating socialist educational logics under post-socialist conditions

Citing an ancient Chinese curse, Immanuel Wallerstein (1998) frequently notes, in reference to our historical world-system and its structures of knowledge, that we are condemned to live in interesting times. Our times are indeed interesting in multiple and complex ways, as could perhaps be claimed at all times. Into the second decade of the twenty-first century, analysts like Wallerstein argue that we have, for some time, been living in world-system defining times, with heightened opportunities to influence the course of the current system’s transformation towards an uncertain alternative. Žižek (2011) concurs, asserting that ‘we are entering a new period in which the economic crisis has become permanent, simply a way of life’, coupled with multiple crises that ‘occur at both extremes of life – ecology (natural externality) and pure financial speculation – not at the core of the productive process’ (403). What Wallerstein, Žižek and other theorists have in common is their elaboration of distinctive challenges that confront global capitalism in the twenty-first century, challenges that some argue defy resolution without disrupting capitalism’s essential operating principle of the endless accumulation of capital (see, e.g. Li 2008; Wallerstein 2011a). In this renewed critique of contemporary capitalism, Alain Badiou (2008) has been central in promoting renewed discussion about the idea of communism, its historical and contemporary meanings (see also Douzinas and Žižek 2010). For Badiou (2008), the communist hypothesis for contemporary times insists that ‘a different collective organisation is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour’ (35). These challenges and possibilities open new spaces for rethinking, imagining and theorising alternatives