Contending that radical politics needs educational theory, Communist Study: Education for the Commons poses a series of educational questions pertinent to revolutionary movements: How can pedagogy bridge the gap between what is and what can be, while respecting the gap and its uncertainty and figurality? How can pedagogy accommodate ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project? In answering these questions, educational theorist Derek R. Ford develops a pedagogical constellation that radically opens up what education is and what it can mean for revolutionary struggle. To chart this constellation, Ford takes the reader on a journey that traverses disciplinary and ideological boundaries, innovatively reading theorists as diverse as Agamben, Marx, Lyotard, Butler, and Lenin. Demonstrating that learning is the educational logic that underpins capitalism and democracy, Ford articulates a theory of communist study as an alternative and oppositional logic. Poetic, performative, and provocative, this theory of study is oriented toward what Ford calls “the sublime feeling of being-in-common,” which, as he insists, is always a commonness against.

"Ford’s Communist Study is insightful, thought-provoking, and therapeutic while unsettling and challenging to critical conventions…. [T]he challenging nature of the book is not accidental but rather it is intentional. As Ford notes, ‘There is a resulting tension that runs through the book, a tension that I hope readers find both productive and troubling’ (p. 7). This book bridges the oft intellectual divide, bringing postmodernism into relation with Marxism and political economy, to structure the edifice of a communist pedagogy. In doing so, Ford establishes himself as a premier educational and political theorist." - Discourse

"[S]uccinct yet dense. . . . Ford’s thinking on communist study is open, potential, and original in pointing out a new possibility of thinking itself." - Studies in Philosophy and Education

"Derek R. Ford’s Communist Study: Education for the Commons advances communist pedagogy." - International Critical Thought