Is it Simple to Be a Marxist in Pedagogy?

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This is a review essay responding to The Gold and the Dross: Althusser for Educators, by David Backer, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2019. As well as critiquing some of the themes of Backer's book, it also situates its subject, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser within his pedagogical and political conjuncture of 1970s France. The review is essay is partly a critical history, and partly a defence of aspects of Althusserian theory, in the face of ad hominem attacks against Althusser the man. Between Althusser, and the disavowal of Althusser by his former student Jacques Rancière, the author retrieves the genuinely revolutionary aspects of Althusserian Marxist pedagogy from its permanently tainted legacy