Marx's Sausage Factory and Marx's Road: Education and the General Class of Commodities

Marx's Sausage Factory and Marx's Road: Education and the General Class of Commodities

This is a paper I have prepared for the London Historical Materialism 22^nd Annual Conference, SOAS, 6–9 November 2025.

You can now view this paper at Academia:  

https://www.academia.edu/144648586/Marxs_Sausage_Factory_and_Marxs_Road_Education_and_the_General_Class_of_Commodities

 

Abstract

This paper complements the presentation I gave at HM London Conference 2024 where the focus was on labour-power and its social re/production. Labour-power is the unique commodity, the ‘class of one’; the only commodity that has the capacity to generate more value – surplus-value – than what it takes to reproduce itself when it is transformed into labour in capitalist labour processes. For this 2025 presentation, the focus is on the general class of commodities; that is, all commodities excluding labour-power. In particular, educational commodification and value production in educational institutions are explored. Can education be a commodity? Is education productive of value? If education is a commodity why does it matter? These perennial questions regarding educational commodification, questions that bedevil mainstream sociology and liberal thought as much as Marxist educational theory, are at the centre of this presentation. The first section of the paper lays the ground by drawing from Marx’s ideas on the commodity and value production. It also presents some of the hand-wringing statements and nebulous arguments regarding whether education can be a commodity, or not. Section two visits Marx’s metaphor of education as a ‘sausage factory’ in Capital. It indicates how, under certain conditions, what goes on in educational institutions results in commodity and value-production. The third section focuses on ‘Marx’s road’; his discussion on the roles of State, Money and ‘capital as capital’ in the production of value in Notebook V from the Grundrisse. The conclusions from this section are then dragged back to the ‘sausage factory’ to give a fuller account of educational commodification and value production. The Conclusion revisits questions of whether education is, or can be, a commodity, if it produces value, and why such questions are important. This last point draws on the work of Mike Neary.    

Glenn Rikowski, Forest Gate, London, 27^th October 2025

Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski  

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn-Rikowski

Reviewing Our History and Making Plans: The Social Science Centre - Lincoln

REVIEWING OUR HISTORY AND MAKING PLANS

THE SOCIAL SCIENCE CENTRE

LINCOLN

Saturday 27th August 2016

10.00 – 4.00

St. Swithin’s Community Centre

Croft Street

Lincoln

LN2 5AZ

Location: https://goo.gl/5Q5NNl

St. Swithin’s Community Centre: http://www.stswithinscroftstreet.org.uk/

The Social Science Centre (SSC), Lincoln is hosting an event to look back at its activities since it was founded in 2011 and to make plans for its future.

10:00–12:00: SSC on Reflection, 2011–2016 (SSC members only)

A chance for all past and present members of the Social Science Centre to reflect on their experiences in the Centre, our activities, roads we have not taken, changes we should make and hopes for the future. Highlights to be shared with others later in the day.

12:30–1:30: Lunch (Public, everyone welcome)

Please join us for lunch!

1:30–4:00: Co-operative Higher Education in Lincoln (Public, all welcome)

Ideas and making plans for the term/year. It has already been suggested we run courses on Brexit and the co-operative movement in Lincoln and the UK

What is the SSC?

The SSC  organises higher education that explores the everyday experiences of its members – who are both students and teachers – through concepts and ideas developed in the social sciences. This includes making critical sense of social problems (like ‘austerity’, racism and nationalism or the privatisation of schools) and important local and global events like ‘Brexit’, learning how they affect us and how we might have an effect on them. Our past courses – The Social Science Imagination, Co-operation and Education, and Know How: Do-It-Ourselves Higher Education – all offered different approaches to this learning.

We are a co-operative organisation that is owned and run by our members. This means that we not only have an experience of higher education, but can decide together what this education should be, how it works and why it matters. All our members can help run the Centre by taking part in democratic decision-making processes and collective ownership and responsibility. No one pays for learning or gets paid for teaching at the SSC because we do not believe knowledge should be for sale. Members with financial means make small monthly contributions to the co-operative to pay for room hire and other running costs.

For more information about the SSC, visit our website: http://socialsciencecentre.org.uk   

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski 

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski