Preface to Ed 4 Rev CL Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Cultural Logic, it is distributed for non-commercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. All other uses must be approved by the author(s) or Cultural Logic. Cultural Logic ISSN 1097-3087 Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice 2013 (Whole Number 20), pp. i-ii Preface Education for Revolution E. Wayne Ross University of British Columbia Rich Gibson San Diego State University Special Issue Editors The core issue of our time is the reality of the promise of perpetual war and escalating color-coded inequality met by the potential of a mass, activist, class-conscious movement to transform both daily life and the system of capitalism itself. In this context, schools in the empires of the world are the centripetal organizing points of much of life. While the claim of capitalist schooling is, in the classics, education, “leading out,” the reality is that schools are segregated illusion factories and in some cases human munitions factories. Rather than leading out, they encapsulate. Mainstream educational and social research typically ignores, disconnects, the ineluctable relationships of what is in fact capitalist schooling, class war, imperialist war, and the development of varying forms of corporate states around the world. At issue, of course, is: What to do? If we are to face the crises of our day we must connect cause and effect, the whole with the parts, past-present-future. The task means connecting war with imperialism; economic collapse with capitalism; and the imperial project to designs on schools, what people know and how they come to know it. It means connecting solutions, that is, recognizing that fights in health care are necessarily fights in education; that the battles about immigration are also battles about wages, hours, and benefits. It means recognizing what is afoot: class war, an international war of the rich on the poor: the social relations of capitalism. The economic restructuring through massive job losses in almost every sector going on now will result in either a horrific defeat for the North American and world working class, or be marked as an awakening when people recognized the many boots on their throats. Last, making connections means transformation, overcoming the system of capital. Without that North Star, any social movement is directionless, recreating injustice in slightly new ways. The long view, either in philosophy or social practice is revolution as things must change, and they will. i i   R o s s   &   G i b s o n   The aim of this special issue on “Education for Revolution” is connecting the long view to what must also be a long slog and this necessarily involves a careful look at existing local, national, and international conditions; working out tactics and strategies that all can understand, none taken apart from a grand strategy of equality and justice. **** This is the second publication to emerge from an ongoing collaboration between the journals Works and Days (print) and Cultural Logic (online). Both journals provide forums for scholarly explorations of cultural studies, pedagogy, institutional critique, and critical university studies. The first collaboration produced “Culture and Crisis,” edited by Joseph G. Ramsey.1 We would like to thank the contributors to this issue for their tremendous scholarship as well as their patience we prepared the issue. This is our second opportunity to put together an issue of Cultural Logic that focuses on radical education. The first issue, “Marxism and Education,” was published in the fall of 2000 and was the basis for what became the award wining book Neoliberalism and Education Reform, published by Hampton Press in 2006.2 The current issue is, in many ways, its sequel. It has been our great pleasure to work with David B. Downing, editor of Works and Days. David and his editorial team, including Nicholas P. Katsiadas, Tracy J. Lassiter, and Reza Parchizadeh contributed in significant ways to the quality and success of this issue and we are greatly indebted to them for their work. Please read their “Foreword to the Revolution” for a substantive overview of the articles in this issue.3 1 See Works and Days 59/60, Vol. 30 (2012) and Cultural Logic 2010: http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/2010.html 2 See: https://www.academia.edu/179166/Neoliberalism_and_Education_Reform 3 The print version of this special issue was published by Works and Days in December 2013. The online version of the issue appears in Cultural Logic 2013, but was initially published in the summer of 2014.